Zion Crumbles

Do not fear, O Zion;

let not your hands grow weak.

The Lord your God is in your midst.  (Zeph 3:16-17)

For most of her history, Israel has dreamt of Zion: a high place where God reigns, and where peace and prosperity, safety and happiness are the order of the day.  Christians inherited this dream from our Jewish ancestors.  We never forgot that we came from a people who were led by God to a Promised Land, a land said to be flowing with milk and honey.

So magnificent was the prospect of the American continent that it was easy for some of our more recent ancestors to imagine that this great land was, at last, the Promised Land of God.  Indeed, to travel across America – from its cities to its vast and varied wilderness – is to encounter a land that might well be blessed by God.  Many Americans have tended to think of our nation as a kind of Zion – an exalted place where God reigns, and where peace and prosperity, safety and happiness are the order of the day.

But we share with Israel – ancient and modern – the regular, painful awakening to our own delusion about this.  God is not in charge here.  Peace and prosperity are both elusive.  And safety and happiness slip easily from our grasp whenever we think we are holding them fast.  

The apparent foolishness of hoping for Zion is one thing that has contributed to the easy dismissal, these days, of religion and faith.  “See how all they hope for proves false and crumbles, time and time again,” say those who only believe that there is nothing to believe in.  And this can be a hard argument to counter, for it often appears to be accurate.  Zion is smoke and mirrors, a fantasy, like Oz – a manipulated but false promise that something beautiful lies at the other end of the yellow brick road.  Only fools, hopelessly stuck in a childish fairy tale, place their hope in such ideas.

It is, of course, true that Zion crumbles every time we think we have it in our grasp, that the Promised Land always lies just beyond the horizon, and sometimes the horizon seems very far away indeed.  As it does today, in the aftermath of the bloody slaughter of holy innocents in Connecticut two days ago.  If Zion was anywhere in sight before, we have lost it now; if ever it seemed within our grasp, it has proved to have been made of a kind of crystal that crumbles and melts at the merest touch of our fingers.

If Zion is the hope for peace and prosperity, safety and happiness, where is that hope today?  It is being readied for burial with the little bodies of twenty beautiful children.

What can we do but keep silent in the face of such sadness?

[Silence]

Somewhere beneath the rubble of our lives, are the foundations of Zion – the foundations of hope.  After the silence… eventually… when we are ready… comes the work of digging through the rubble of disaster to rebuild Zion, which is to say, to rebuild hope in our lives and in the lives, I pray, of those whose children or brothers, or sisters, or friends, or teachers, or students, were taken violently from them.

Every child is a Zion-in-miniature – a symbol of hope, of peace and prosperity, safety and happiness – and every child is just as fragile as the hope for Zion, just as susceptible to the wickednesses of every age, just as likely to crumble at our touch, especially when we treat so many children with a cruel indifference in our own day and age.  See how easily they crumble.  See how easily we destroy our own hope.  Zion crumbles. 

A voice says, “Cry.”  And I said, “What shall I cry?”  All flesh is grass, and its beauty is like the flower of the field.  Zion crumbles.

But a voice reminds us to dig through the rubble  - painful though it may be.  Yesterday that voice belonged to the parent of a murdered six-year-old girl, Robbie Parker, who, in expressing his grief, found the strength to offer his prayers and sympathy for the family of the man who killed his daughter.  As Zion crumbled all around him, he was already identifying the stones with which it would be rebuilt: stones of forgiveness, faith, and love.

Do not fear, O Zion;

let not your hands grow weak.

The Lord your God is in your midst.

… [and] I will bring you home.

Sometimes the voice is all we have; a voice that says, “Cry!”

What shall we cry?

We might remind one another that while it may be deeply American to defend the right to bear arms, it is yet more deeply godly to burn with a desire to beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.  And that means every kind of weapon, firearm, missile, and bomb: transformed in the heat of God’s forge.  For Zion cannot be built with the edge of a sword or the barrel of a gun.

How easily and how often Zion crumbles.

Since Friday, Zion has lain in smoking, bloody ruins in a school in Connecticut.

Who knows why God has made Zion so fragile, when we think we need a fortress?  Why is hope so easily killed?

A voice says, “Cry!”  And I said, “What shall I cry?”

Do not fear, O Zion;

let not your hands grow weak.

The Lord your God is in your midst.

… [and] I will bring you home.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

16 December 2012

Saint Mark’s Church

2 days after the shooting of twenty children

and seven adults in Newtown, CT

The Best First Line

What’s the best first sentence? You know, like “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” or “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” First sentences are important – they set the mood, set the tone, draw you in – but they’re also just kind of fun, even famous in their own right. The American Book Review has even created a list of the top 100 best first lines of all time. “Call me Ishmael” is number one, in case you’re curious. What’s your favorite? Okay, I know, you’re in church, so you’re all thinking that maybe you’d better go with  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” since God is listening and all, but let’s just assume that one for now. What about “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Or “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Or “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Or “Mrs. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”*

There are, of course, tons of first lines to choose from, but I’ll bet that not one of you would pick “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.” Now, true, this isn’t exactly the first line of Luke’s Gospel, but that line isn’t much better. “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

Oy. That sets the tone for sure, although I’m not sure it really draws you in as much as it makes you imagine yourself in a post-lunch overly-warm lecture hall about to settle in for a long winter’s nap. But you shouldn’t give up on Luke too quickly, because even though he says (twice) that he’s planning on writing an “orderly account,” once he starts writing, he just can’t help himself – he ends up writing a musical. Everyone in his story just keeps breaking into song – Mary and Zechariah and the angel with the multitude of the heavenly host and Simeon…they’re all so full of joy and wonder that they’ve just gotta sing!

But now that Luke has gotten to chapter 3, it’s like he suddenly remembers what kind of story he’s supposed to be writing. Right! Right, an orderly account. Okay. Back to lecture. So, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, etc., etc., etc., But we must be careful here. Because Luke is not just setting the stage for the who, what, where, and when – he is also setting us up. Now most of us have heard this text so many times that we tend to gloss over the first part of it – right, a bunch of historical figures who may or may not appear later on in the story – and we’ve learned to expect the second part, – right, of course the word of God came to John, he is the John, after all, John the Baptizer, the voice in the wilderness, the one who proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Seems self-evident to me. But look again at what Luke sets up here – that in the time of emperors and governors and rulers and princes and principalities and priests and people of immense power, the word of God came not to them but to that guy – that kind of weird guy standing by a stream in the middle of the wilderness.

And the great question is – Why? Why choose that guy? Why would God choose John? Why would God choose John’s unlikely, ancient mother to give birth to him, an unlikely, awkward prophet, just so that God could put his powerful word into John’s unlikely, acerbic mouth. Why John, a nobody, instead of all of those other people who had more money, more power, more prestige, and could certainly have had more impact? We can’t say it’s because they were just inherently unsympathetic to God’s cause or unreceptive to God’s call – you just have to look at the story of the conversion of Paul to know that God is quite happy to find a way of working around that. So why John? Or for that matter, why Abraham? Why an old, old man to be the father of a great nation? Why slippery, shifty Jacob to build the foundation for the twelve tribes of Israel? Why stuttering Moses to be God’s mouthpiece before Pharaoh? Why Ruth? Why David? Why Mary? Why does God always seem to favor the most unlikely people to do his work in the world? If the first line of creation is that in the beginning God lovingly and carefully created heaven and earth, why in the world would he hand over the future of that world to such a bunch of misfits?

Well, first of all, it’s because God, the author of all, loves a good plot twist. God delights in surprises, delights in showing us redemption and grace in the most unexpected places. I imagine that it pleases God to no end to watch his people discover him by stumbling upon him, to see us jump with a start when he pops up in strange places. After all, this is the God of the burning bush, the God of Balaam’s talking donkey, the God who appeared to Elijah as a sound of silence. God loves a good surprise, not only because surprises bring us joy in a very particular way, but also because surprises help us to see how dependent we are on him, help us to find him; surprises help to draw us in. I certainly know this from my own life. How could a God who called me to ordained ministry from Saint Mark’s Church, then sent me to low-church Virginia Theological Seminary, and then called me back to Saint Mark’s be anything other than a God who revels in a good plot twist?

But even more important than God’s love of surprise is God’s love of us. God is an author who desperately wants his characters to know one another. Why choose an unlikely prophet? Because by choosing the unlikely, God shows us that to hear his word, we are going to have to really pay attention to each other, to be alert, to look and listen for his word at all times and in all places, because we never know when we just might hear it. If God only spoke to us through the most likely mouth, we might very well just stop noticing when those mouths were moving. But there can be no cheating here. We cannot assume that we’ll hear God in a particular place or from a particular person. We cannot assume that we’ll hear God speaking to us through the most powerful, the most prominent, or the most predictable. God’s choosing the unlikely reminds us to never, ever rule someone out as a potential messenger for the word of God – the man on the street corner who is shaking for his next fix but who reminds us as we pass by that we are blessed, the child who has just learned his words but who tells us that he likes being blessed at the altar because he can feel the angel wings beating around his head, the self-avowed atheist who unintentionally echoes the great commandment when he tells us that love is a force known best by our actions – even the woman who gazes back at us in the mirror. God is happy to send his word to the most unlikely among us if that means that we will have to pay better attention to one another, to learn to read one another better, to look – hard – for the Christ that lives within each one of us, and to love one another as we love ourselves.  

And this is Advent. To look for God in the most unlikely of places – in the wilderness, in a barren womb, in a manger. This is Advent. To wait and watch with eyes and hearts wide open and expectant, to look for the coming of Christ again and again and again, to stand together upon the height and to look to the east, where God will surely gather all of us misfits into one. This is Advent. To look for God’s holy surprise – his word in our mouths, his grace in our hearts, his strength in our hands, his Son in our story. So here is the best first line of this best first season. In the final year of the first term of Barack Obama, when Tom Corbett was governor of Pennsylvania and Michael Nutter mayor of Philadelphia, when Katherine Jefferts Schori was the presiding bishop and Charles Bennison finishing his tenure as Bishop of Pennsylvania, the word of God came to…who? You? Me? Your partner? Your father? The person sitting next to you in the pew? The person you’re going to stumble across when you step out of this church? May God finish writing that first sentence for you in a most wonderful and most surprising way.

*The first lines listed here are from, in order, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Star Wars by George Lucas, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, A Christmas Carol by Dickens, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

9 December 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Advent Man

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

For most of the time I have lived in Philadelphia – more than ten years now – I have been aware of the presence of an unusual character who regularly passes through the neighborhood here.  I have no idea if he lives nearby, or if he is also seen and known in other parts of the city.  I can’t say I see him every day; but three or four times a week would not be unusual.  And sometimes I don’t see him; I only hear him, so I know he is nearby.  He is a trim, fit fellow of indeterminate age – he could be in his 50s, but he could be in his 60s – it’s hard to say.  He wears runner’s tights, with short, runner’s shorts over them, and usually high socks, as well.  I think he always has a cap on his head, and usually there is a set of small headphones over his cap, covering his ears.  Whether or not the headphones are connected to anything, I cannot say; it is not immediately apparent that they are.  And he has a small backpack on his back.  The colors of his close-fitting outfit are muted, not outrageous - blues and blacks and greys.  The get-up, which seldom changes very much, is not, I think, intended to draw attention to him.  Were it not for two distinct features of his ensemble, he could pass for any very fit but un-stylish, late-middle aged man devoted to his daily exercise.

But there are these two distinct features that render him remarkable.

First, he traverses around the neighborhood – and I can only surmise, around the entire city – on rollerblades.  Second, he carries with him a trumpet, upon which he occasionally blows short, loud blasts of a note or two, never an entire tune.  I am not at all sure he knows how to play the trumpet, although I have seen him carry one for years.  But he does know how to get a bit of noise out of the instrument.  And he rolls around the city sounding blasts from his trumpet, for no apparent reason.

Actually, I am being a little un-truthful in this description, for, in fact, a month or two ago, the rollerblading man gave up his trumpet in favor of a French horn, which appears a bit newer and shinier than the trumpet he once carried.  As was the case with the trumpet, one cannot say for certain that the man knows how to play the French horn.  One can only say that he does indeed know how to evince short, mellow blasts from the French horn, which almost evoke in the hearer’s mind hunting scenes in the Bavarian hills, but not quite.  I’m not sure what made the man forsake his trumpet in favor of the French horn.  I don’t think it’s the holidays, for I don’t ever recall noticing in years gone by seasonal adjustments in his orchestration or his repertoire.  And I wouldn’t venture an opinion to the question for which instrument the man demonstrates a keener aptitude.  And I must say that I have no idea what the man thinks or hopes he is accomplishing as he wheels his way through the streets of the city.

I wish I knew.

I wish I knew what dream or thought process or voice in his head compelled the man to don an outfit not unlike that of an Olympic bobsledder’s, with headphones either to drown out the sounds of the world, or to provide a soundtrack to his journeys, mount himself on wheels, a brass horn in his hand, and career around the city, blowing one-note fanfares as he goes.  And I wish I knew what made him change instruments.  Maybe the French horn was a gift!

I wonder if he is a religious man. I wonder if he is a Christian of some variety (for we come in many varieties).  I wonder if he reads the scriptures, and I wonder if he does, how does he read them?  I wonder if his get-up, and his skating circuits around the city are born of religious conviction.  I wonder if is his trumpet blasts – or more recently the blasts from his French horn – are meant to sound declarations for which he has no words, or which simply require the announcement of a brass section.  I wonder what he thinks he knows that I don’t know… if that’s why he does what he does.

Because I have nothing else to call him, and because it suits my purposes, I am going to call him Advent Man.  And because I have never had the opportunity to ask him, I am going to imagine what it is he believes.  I am going to imagine what he hears through his headphones, and what he sees in his dreams.  I am going to imagine what he carries in his little backpack.

I imagine that Advent Man lives in a state of perpetual preparedness - ready to go at a moment’s notice, ready to get wherever it is he’s going faster than the next guy, and ready to sound the alarm – whatever it may signify.  He is ready!  He is Advent Man, hear his horn!

I imagine that what Advent Man hears through his headphones may be the Gospel reading for today:  “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  I imagine he hears these verses in pronounced by the voice of Sir Alec Guiness.

Or maybe it’s the voice of Morgan Freeman in his head:  “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

Stand up!  Raise up your heads!

I imagine that inside Advent Man’s little backpack is some water and a few power bars – just enough to tide him over if he is caught unawares for a day or two.  And maybe a rain jacket and a nice warm fleece.

I imagine that Advent Man has dreams very much like yours and like mine, and if he ever dreams of God, he dreams that God loves him, and searches him out, because I imagine that Advent Man knows he is like a sheep without a shepherd.

I don’t imagine that Advent Man hears voices in his head, other than the ones reading the scriptures to him.  I imagine that he hears Betty White telling the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.  And James Earl Jones telling the stories of John the Baptist (a particular hero of his, I would guess).

And I imagine that he hears Dame Maggie Smith reading Jeremiah:  “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The LORD is our righteousness.’”  Wouldn’t you like to hear Maggie Smith deliver those lines?  I sure would!

“Stand up!  Raise your head!”  That I imagine, is the secret message of Advent Man’s horn-blowing: Stand up!  Raise your heads!

I imagine that Advent Man doesn’t know how to play either the trumpet or the French horn because he knows it doesn’t matter.  When the time comes, God will put the tune in his heart and the notes on his lips!  And in the meantime, his short blasts of warning are enough:  Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near!

And here is Advent Man’s greatest secret – not that he knows when the Messiah will come again, but that he knows he is in need of redemption.  He knows he is broken, sinful, pig-headed, and selfish.  He knows he has done those things he ought not to have done, and left undone those things he ought to have done.  And he has spent time, roller-blading around this city, thinking about all these things, recalling his shortcomings, remembering his foolishness, repenting for his sins.  All that time on wheels has not led him to reflect on how awesome he is.  It has made him realize how much he needs God in his life, and how prone he is to push God away.

Does he race around the city, as he does, in order to keep the wind in his face, to dry the tears as he recalls his own sinfulness?  And do the tears turn joyful when he hears, somewhat surprisingly, these words again - “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near,” – read by Oprah?  Who’s to account for the voices that proclaim the Gospel inside his head?  What’s important is that they grab his attention.  They get him out of bed every morning.  They loosen his fingers when they feel stiff, lacing up his rollerblades.  They remind him to raise his head, when he looks in the mirror, and to keep it raised throughout the day.  And they keep repeating the promise: your redemption is drawing near.  Your redemption is drawing near.  Your redemption is drawing near.

Advent is a time of warning and caution.  It is a call to repentance and a reminder of our human frailty, foolishness and selfishness.  But it is also a reminder of God’s promises.

Advent asks, why did you get up early to shop on Black Friday but you won’t get up to worship me?

Advent asks why you spent $1.5 billion on Cyber Monday and put $5 in the offering plate for God?

Advent asks what you mean when you call yourself a Christian?

Advent asks what it is you are hoping for?

Advent asks if you think you love God, are you ready to meet him?  Do you want to?

And Advent Man hears all these questions in his head – asked by the reasonable voice of Anderson Cooper, or sometime Walter Cronkite, because Advent Man is old enough to remember what Cronkite sounded like.

He hears all these questions in his head, and he cannot sit still or remain silent, even though he does not yet know where to go or what to say.  This is not stupid of Advent Man: this is faithful, which sometimes looks stupid to those who have no interest in a costly faith.

I imagine that Advent Man’s faith is a costly faith: it has cost him everything and boiled his life down to his simple outfit, and his jaunts through the city, and his one-note solos.  And I wonder, again, about why he switched from the trumpet to the French horn. I wonder if it’s because, occasionally, once in a very odd while, Advent man hears in his head the Gospel proclaimed by a voice that can be none other than God’s voice:  “Stand up!  Raise your head!  Your redemption is drawing near!”

Maybe to him, God’s voice sounded more like a French horn than a trumpet.

Or maybe it reminded him that the sound of the Gospel never grows stale, but rings out with new timbres and different tones, in new and different times.

I don’t know.  I can’t say.  I have no idea, in fact, if the man on rollerblades hears anything, or cares one fig for what people think when he blows his horn.  He might be carrying in his backpack nothing but a tuna fish sandwich and a Diet Coke, to munch on at lunch time, for all I know.  He might not hear any voices articulating the scriptures to him, and he might resent any comparison whatsoever to John the Baptist.  He and his dopey horn-blowing might mean nothing at all.

Which means that it may be the voice of God, proclaiming in my ears and yours, and in my heart and yours, and in this place when we gather:  Stand up!  Raise your heads!  Your redemption is drawing near.

Because I hear that ancient message proclaimed, and I pray you do too.

And I am reminded that I am broken, sinful, pig-headed, and selfish.  I know that I have done those things I ought not to have done, and left undone those things I ought to have done.  And so have you.  And sometimes I could use a strong breeze to dry the tears as I reflect on all these things.  But in Advent, my tears are turned to tears of joy, if I can just bend my ears and my heart to hear that proclamation carried somehow, mysteriously through the streets of the city:  Stand up!  Raise your head!  Your redemption is drawing near!  Your redemption is drawing near!  Your redemption is drawing near!

And the voice is unmistakable: it is the voice of Love.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Advent Sunday

2 December 2012

Camelot

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Late one recent night, I found myself staying up long past a reasonable hour to watch a broadcast of the 1967 film version of Camelot, with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave.  The film is every bit endearing as I recalled, but I’d forgotten how shot through with angst the story is: how obvious to everyone is the affair between Guinevere and Lancelot; how unwilling is Arthur to acknowledge the truth; how cruel he is to Pellinore, the old man who tries gently to urge Arthur to accept the truth; how desperate is the king’s fondness for Lancelot; how inevitable is Guinevere’s fate, considering Arthur’s pride in the rule of law; how wicked is Mordred’s Oedipal jealousy.  And all presented with a jaunty score of song after memorable song.

Because of the Kennedy appropriation of the idea of Camelot, “that once there was a spot/ for one brief shining moment/ known as Camelot,” I think we tend to recall the story of the musical as if it was as chirpy as its title song.  But really it’s a story full of conflict and pain.  And the characters are all deeply flawed.  (So, I guess the Kennedy comparison holds.)  By the end of the movie, Mordred has desecrated the Round Table, Guinevere has been rescued by Lancelot from burning at the stake in the nick of time, and Arthur is preparing to go to battle with Lancelot.  England is clearly headed for the Dark Ages.  It’s not what you would call a happy ending.

I wonder if the story of Camelot has any parallels with the Christian story.  At the center: our hero, whose commitment to justice was admirable, but ultimately the institution he built to advance the cause wasn’t up to the task.  The church, like the Round Table: a good idea, but ultimately susceptible to the foibles of both its enemies and its own flawed leaders.  Of course, both provide fodder for good musical numbers and colorful costumes with a certain medieval flair.  But does the church seem to be headed for any better an ending than the musical’s?  Or will all be wrack and ruin by the time we finally acknowledge what everyone else can see is going on around us?  And do we have anything more to hold out to the would-be believer than a story that might be nice if it was true, but that seems frayed at the edges and straining at the seams?  Perhaps there was one brief shining moment long ago when the Christian faith was full of promise: before the schisms, and the crusades, before the greed and power and corruption, before the scandal and abuse, before the willful ignorance, before the disregard for women, before the stultifying self-absorption, etc., etc.  But you can see what happened.

One wonders if Arthur had a bit of a messianic complex.  Did he think to himself, in the words of the Christ, “My kingdom is not of this world”?  Or was his problem that he didn’t realize that the ideals of Camelot could never survive in this world, that they had to be aspects of another dimension of reality?  To look at the other side of that coin, is Jesus as delusional as King Arthur, when he stands before Pilate and says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”?

And what use is either of them to us – Jesus or King Arthur – if their kingdoms are not of this world?  After all, we have to live in this world, we have to work and strive, and hope and suffer, and repair, and restore, and ruin, and recover, and heal, and fall sick again, and forget, then remember, and lose things, and find some of them, and break, and fix, and wander, and get lost, and discover, and guess, and invent, and disfigure, and design, and build, and burn, and assemble, and discard, and recycle, and fight, and resent, and forgive, and repent, and assist, and cook, and wash, and nap, and conquer, and overcome, and deceive, and risk, and give, and take, and coddle, and cajole, and swoon, and sing, and sew, and float, and swim, and love, and live, and die in this world – not in some magical fairytale land.  What good is it to us to tell us that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world?

Here’s what I think Jesus means by this, when he tells us his kingdom if not of this world.  It means that Jesus’ kingdom is not a fleeting thing, that lasts for one, brief, shining moment.  It means that Jesus’ kingdom is not a fantasy kingdom, where the climate must be perfect all the year, where winter is forbidden till December, and exits March the second on the dot.  It means that Jesus’ kingdom is not a kingdom of wishful thinking, where rain may never fall till after sundown, and by eight the morning fog must disappear.

Fantasy kingdoms are built in this world all the time, and they deliver only fantasy promises that, like a Broadway musical, bring momentary salve, but not real healing; a happy tune to hum, but not real hope; a call to arms, but not real justice; all the craziness of romance, but not real love; and illusions of resuscitation but not real life.  But the kingdom Jesus is talking about is a kingdom of real healing, real hope, real justice, real love, and real life.  It exists in dimensions beyond this world, but it is not inaccessible from this world.

How, then, does one get to Jesus’ kingdom?

There are really only two steps involved.  First, you follow Jesus.  Then you go where he sends you.

Now, following Jesus is not so easy.  To do so, you probably have to hear him call you, which is one reason to come to church – for here the call of Jesus is pronounced week after week as we proclaim the Good News of his ministry, and tell the story of his salvation.  Sometimes you have to stop and listen to hear Jesus calling.  You have to turn off your phone, take your earbuds out of your ears, shut off your iPod, and listen.  I’d call this praying – for listening is at least half of prayer.  Though it’s certainly possible that you could hear Jesus call while you are praising him: singing a hymn, or reciting a psalm, or raising your eyes to see him lifted high, as bells ring, during the Mass.

Then, if you listen to Jesus and follow him, eventually you are very likely to hear him tell you to go somewhere and do something.  Go ask for forgiveness where you have needed it for a long time.  Go help the hungry, the poor, the lonely, the sick, or the imprisoned.  Go help a child who the world is failing.  Go help a church that is struggling.  Go help someone whose life was turned upside down in a hurricane.  It’s hard to follow Jesus and never hear him tell you to get up and go somewhere and do something.

Now, these two steps, may not seem to take you very far, but the trick to the Christian life is in repeating these two simple steps over and over.  We have to stop and listen for Jesus over and over, because his voice is easily drowned out by the din of this world, and many people are actively trying to obscure the sound of it.  And we can’t follow Jesus unless we are listening to him.  And we have to go where Jesus sends us over and over, because mostly he sends us on small excursions that last an hour or two, or a half a day here and there, without interrupting every other aspect of our daily schedules.  So we repeat these two simple steps over and over: follow and go, follow and go, follow and go.  (If I was Lerner and Loewe, I’d write a song here.)

At the end of Camelot, as Arthur is about to take up the battle with Lancelot; he encounters a young boy named Tom, who tells the king that he wants to be a knight of the Round Table.  The boy’s naivete gives Arthur pause to reflect on what’s happened to his kingdom.  Despite his disappointment and his misgivings he has Tom kneel, and makes him a knight, commissioning him with a reprise of the title song of the show: “Don’t let it be forgot/ that once there was a spot/ for one brief shining moment/ that was known as Camelot.”

Long before I had any inkling about being a priest of God’s church, I wanted to be Tom.  I suppose I really wanted to be Richard Burton, but you have to start somewhere.  But now that I am older, I see how sad the story of Camelot is, and how hopeless the nostalgia it rests on.  Like all the Arthurian legend, it looks wistfully backward without any real hope of building Camelot in this world, because, after all, Camelot is the stuff of fantasy and musical theater.

But you and I have to live in this world.  We have to work and strive, and hope and suffer, and repair, and restore, and ruin, and recover, and heal, and fall sick again, and forget, then remember, and lose things, and find some of them, and break, and fix, and wander, and get lost, and discover, and guess, and invent, and disfigure, and design, and build, and burn, and assemble, and discard, and recycle, and fight, and resent, and forgive, and repent, and assist, and cook, and wash, and nap, and conquer, and overcome, and deceive, and risk, and give, and take, and coddle, and cajole, and swoon, and sing, and sew, and float, and swim, and love, and live, and die in this world – not in some magical fairytale land.

A fairytale land is what the church looks like, what the kingdom of God looks like, to those who are not willing to take those two simple steps: follow and go, follow and go.

But when we follow Jesus, listening to him, and then go where he sends us, doing the work he gives us, we find that we are already learning what it is like to live in his kingdom, where the hungry are fed, the poor are lifted from their poverty and given a decent education, the sick are cared for with compassion, where love sustains relationships despite many challenges, where justice is upheld, and where life does not end at the grave, as long as we are willing to follow and go, follow and go.

All these things are happening in God’s church, where his kingdom is being built even now.  All these things are real and true right now, in places where the saints of God follow and go, follow and go.  All these things are part of the life of this parish community, this church, this gathering.  This is no Camelot, we are just a parish church on Locust Street, in a city that struggles and fails to live up to its name.  But when we follow Jesus, listening carefully for his call, and the go where he sends us, we find that his kingdom, strangely not of this world, is nevertheless being built right here.

And so we rejoice in his kingship, and we crown him with honor and glory, we wave his banner on high.  And, God willing, we follow and go, follow and go; making the journey toward his kingdom which is not of this world, not remembered from one, brief, shining moment long ago, but is being built right here when we follow and go. 

And it’s enough to make you want to sing about it!

May God put the song of his kingdom on our lips, and in our hearts, and may he make us ever ready to follow him when he calls and to go wherever he sends us, in the service of Jesus Christ, our king.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

25 November 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Right Impression

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

It is a mercy, really, that we don’t know his name. It is not always the case, as you know, that disciples who say silly things remain anonymous – just think of poor Peter, for example. But in this moment, the disciple who says the silly thing remains mercifully nameless. He and the other disciples are heading out of the temple in Jerusalem. They have spent the past several days there – listening to Jesus spar with the Sadducees; watching the rich come and go; noticing, at Jesus’ prompting, the generous giving of one poor widow woman. But now Jesus has gathered up his sheep and begun to lead them out of the temple gate. As they wind their way down the stairs of the temple mount, pushing through the hordes of Passover pilgrims, this one disciple can’t help but turn back. He looks up, way up, craning his neck to see the stones stacked seemingly into the very clouds. “Whew!” he whistles, his eyes wide. “What great stones you have!” he says, innocent as a lamb.

Now, to be honest, knowing what we know about Herod’s temple, this disciple’s awestruck appreciation isn’t actually that silly. The temple was, in fact, hugely impressive; it was designed to be hugely impressive; it was constructed to make everyone who saw it whistle in appreciation. The platform it was built upon was in and of itself an architectural marvel, with enormous foundation stones, some of which were as high as this nave and weighed over 400 tons. Herod’s temple in Jerusalem was one of the hallmarks of his reign, an outward sign of his vast wealth and his immense – and immensely dangerous – power. It is no wonder that this little disciple from a backwater in the Galilee gushed a bit over the building, even felt a sense of pride that this was his temple, the mercy seat of his God. The temple made its mark upon him; he was im-pressed, and he thought his teacher would be impressed, too.

So in the face of this disciple’s wide-eyed wonder, Jesus’ response must have felt like the bite of a big bad wolf. “Those great stones? All the better to deceive you with, my dear disciple. Do you see these great buildings? Soon, someone will huff and puff and blow even this stone house down.” This is a devastating declaration. Because the temple was much more than a source of wonder and pride for the children of Israel; it was a mark of their election, a sign of future hope. It had already been destroyed once but had risen from the ashes, a golden assurance to generations to come of the faithfulness of their God. The temple was the locus of God’s relationship to his people, the birthplace of a new kingdom, where the Messiah would come to help his people shed the shackles of their slavery to the godless wolves of Rome. If the temple were to fall, how could Israel be saved?

It’s no wonder, then, that the moment Jesus broke their journey with a stop on the Mount of Olives, the favored (and named) disciples cornered him and pressed him for more details. They must have been shocked and scared. Ever since their youth the ultimate importance of the temple had been impressed upon them; the mark of the meaning of this building pressed into their hearts.  All of their hopes on that temple were founded, a temple their Lord had just told them would most surely fall. How could God work without a temple? And when would all this happen? As they sat gazing across the Kidron Valley at the shining temple mount, they asked themselves desperately, knowing all this, what do we do now?

That temple did fall, of course, razed by Roman troops only forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. But there are still plenty of temples for us to admire. And we are, after all, so easily impressed. Ever since our youth, the importance of these grand, worldly structures have been impressed upon us, and we almost can’t help but to place our hope upon their foundations. And so we find ourselves admiring the temples of wealth, of intelligence, of beauty or health or talent. We find that we have set our hope on the structures of human love, on a foundation of friendships that are sometimes frail and passion that is always fleeting. We find ourselves standing awestruck before the vision of a nation so pure in concept, so right in construct, that we imagine it will continue to be the vehicle for peace and justice in the world until time immemorial. We even find ourselves relying on the temple of the Church itself, impressed by its longevity and its righteous call to serve as the body of Christ in the world.

But today’s Gospel invites us to square our shoulders and to ask this difficult question: what if none of these temples last? A shocking question to be sure. What happens if we lose our wealth, if our mind is ravaged of dementia? What happens if our beauty fades, our bodies weaken, our talents dim? What happens if relationships fail, if love falls away or passion dies? What happens if our nation stumbles, overcome by political divisiveness, greed, or lust for power? And what happens if the Church as we know it fades away, just another vehicle for grace wrecked by all too human hands? What do we do then?

The tricky thing about this is that God can and does work through any and all of these things. All of them are gifts of God – our wealth, our hearts and minds, the gift of our bodies and our talents, the gift of human love, the gift of passion, the gift of a country that is founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, the gift of a Church that strives to preach the Gospel to all peoples and nations, the gift of a glorious, holy temple. But Jesus reminds us that we must not be overly impressed by any of these things, because all of these things fall. None of them is sure to last; all of them can be toppled to the ground so that not even one stone is left standing upon another. And while we might like to imagine that we can predict the way that God will use these gifts to work his will, that is not for us to decide. God will be what God will be. Temples fall. So knowing that, what do we do now?

When the temple of Jerusalem fell, indeed not one stone of the temple was left standing upon another. But there are still stones there. The Western Wall is all that is left – the remnant of one of the supporting walls for Herod’s great temple mount. There one can still see massive white stones, worn by thousands of years of rain and sun and the hands of millions of people who have traveled to Jerusalem only to fall on their knees in this holiest of places. They have stood with open mouths, craning their necks upward, awestruck by the palpable sense of God’s presence in this place, by the energy that emanates from the smooth face of the rocks and the cracks that pulse with prayers. These people, some of you among them, have not chosen to stand before these stones because they are impressed by their size, their age, or their architectural beauty. They have chosen to stand before these stones because they bear witness to the fact that when the temple falls, God is still there.

When the temple falls, God still reigns. When the temple falls, God is still at work. When the temple falls, and the wounded earth whips up superstorms and tsunamis; when the temple falls, and people struggle to find food to feed their families; when the temple falls, and rockets slice the air between Israel and Gaza; when the temple falls, and our most beloved dies, or our business fails, or our lover leaves us, or our mother no longer knows our name, God is still at work. God reigns even in the rubble; God is still sovereign even in the midst – or perhaps particularly in the midst – of suffering. We need not know how. And we need not distract ourselves with worry and predictions of when the next stone will hit the ground. What we need to do is watch and pray. “Beware that no one leads you astray,” Jesus tells his disciples. Beware of those voices sounding in your ears or inside your own heads that want to tell you that because one of these temples has fallen our world must surely end. These current sufferings are just the beginning of something new, the labor pains of a new creation groaning to be born. Let God worry about how that will happen. You just watch and pray, look for ongoing work of God in the world and trust that you will find it in the most beautiful and unexpected places. When you do this, when you let temples fall and begin to hope in things not seen, then your eyes will be opened wide enough to see that each breath is pregnant with possibility, each moment is an opportunity to witness what God is bearing into the world. Each moment will become an opportunity to be permanently and wonderfully impressed with the true wonders of this world – a tiny manger, a bloody cross, an empty tomb. Knowing this, what do we do now? Watch. Watch and pray. Look up, way up, to see what a great God we have. With this God at our right hand, we will not fall.

The Secret Millionaire

You may listen to Fr. Mullen's sermon here.

A widow haunts my dreams these days.  But she is not the widow of Zarephath who we heard about this morning, who although she was about to starve to death herself, fed the prophet Elijah her last morsels of food, and found that God supplied sustenance to keep her and her son and the prophet alive.  And she is not the widow who puts her two cents into the treasury – what we used to call the widow’s mite – who we heard about in Mark’s Gospel this morning.  Neither of these is the widow that haunts me.

She’s a widow about whom I have not told you before today, although I imagine that some of you have harbored suspicions about her, others have wondered, but been afraid to guess, afraid to hope.  You have thought it rude to wonder too much about her circumstances.  There is this widow, you see, who lived a simple life.  She’d been a widow so long that no one could even remember her husband; we just assumed she’d had one long ago, because she was always referred to as a “widow.”  She was never well-known.  You are struggling to remember her name, even now, but I think you know where she sat in church – nowhere obvious, always off on one of the side aisles.  She had not many friends, but she was a faithful church-goer.  And you would have supposed (if you stopped to suppose such things) that she was a faithful, if not extravagant, supporter of the church.  She made the kind of financial contribution that will be missed, but will not be a disastrous loss.  This makes sense, since you and I always believed that she had enough, but not too much, if you know what I mean.  We have heard about widows like this before: gentle, quiet, unassuming women in their communities.  Almost entirely un-remarkable while they are alive.  But in death their great secret is revealed – and it is always the same secret, although the details may vary.

Have you guessed who the widow is, yet?  Can you picture her in your mind’s eye?  Do you remember now if she sat on your side of the church or the other side?  Have you remembered her name?  Do you remember wondering if she was childless, too.  No heirs to consider.  Or was she?  Wasn’t there someone sitting next to her at Christmas and Easter?  A child, home for the holidays?  Or a nephew, a niece?  Maybe there was a family and they were just kept at bay?  Or stayed at bay of their own accord?  Hard to say.  Hard to know the details of the life of someone so private, so quiet, so nearly anonymous.

When she began to invade my dreams, I looked for stories about women like her, because I knew I had come across them before.  Here is what a simple search uncovered:

In the Pacific Northwest, in a coastal town in Washington state, a 98-year-old woman died, and directed that the small fortune of $4.5 million she had amassed all be spent to improve her little seaside town.

In Lake Lillian, Minnesota, a 97-year-old woman left in her will, the sum of about $6 million to be spent in her community of 238 people.  (That’s more than $25,000 per person, if they just divvied it up!)

In Lake Forest, Illinois, a 100-year-old woman died and left $7 million to her alma mater, a little, local college.

In Scotland, an 83-year-old spinster (as the Scots insisted on calling her) left 1.8 million pounds sterling the SPCA.

Back in California, a 96-year-old woman left $1.7 million to the Salvation Army.

Now do you remember the widow who has been so much on my mind?

We have all heard these stories.  And some of us have heard the stories that never make it into the papers – stories about churches just like Saint Mark’s that are the beneficiaries of the largesse of these secret millionaires, these little old ladies who have been preparing a surprise for their lucky churches.  What church doesn’t dream that such a secret millionaire will shower her generosity on it? 

When such a widow has been in your own midst, and on your mind, you start to wonder about her.  What made her the way she is?

Widows, of course, have been hurt by loss.  They are defined by something missing in their lives, by a relationship they once had but now they can only long for.  Widows have suffered.  They know something of pain and brokenness.  They know loneliness, too.  And they know what it is like to plead with God for mercy, to beg God to make things turn out differently, to fix something that is beyond their own ability to fix, even though they have fixed a great deal in their lives before.  Widows know what it feels like to be weak, and at the end of their rope.  They know what it feels like to run out of hope.  They know what it feels like to consider the possibility that God has deserted them, along with everybody else.  Widows know what it feels like to conclude that they must now get on with something – with life – on their own, without any help, with the possibility of much joy, without much hope of promise.  They know resignation, maybe despair.  Virtue is often attributed to widows – a characteristic they do not always think they deserve.  It is earned, I suppose, through acceptance, which is sometimes manifest in a kind of wisdom.

And some widows, apparently, are shrewd investors, or careful savers, or maybe just cheapskates – but by whatever means they reach a certain age with a certain fortune.  Some widows are these secret millionaires, who keep their wealth a secret, but whose generosity is eventually revealed.

Boy, do we love those widows!  Everyone dreams that such a widow inhabits their small town, their little college, or the church they belong to. 

Have you ever dreamt that such a widow was a part of the congregation here at Saint Mark’s?

And when you have noticed that there are things that need to be done, work you imagine we could accomplish – whether it’s tending to the buildings, or establishing new programs, or caring for the needy – have you hoped, as I have, that there was among us a secret millionaire: a widow whose name you don’t know, but who is probably sitting over there on the side aisle, under her hat or her veil, whose generosity will eventually provide for all that we need as a parish?

Oh, I have had those dreams!

I have wondered about one or two of you.  But, of course, the secret wealth was to be found where I least expected it.  I thought she had barely two nickels to rub together – two pennies, like the widow in the Gospel.  But how I underestimated her!

Have you guessed at the identity of the widow in our midst?

My friends, my dear ones, you know the widow yourselves, for you are the widow.

I know you lead a straightforward life; not a lot of extravagances.  Some of you feel un-known, or un-noticed; some of you want to stay that way.  You are not old, but you have lived enough of life to learn a thing or two.  Some of you have families, but it has been a long time since your kids were in church with you except on holidays.  You wonder if they will ever find their way back to the church.  You are a faithful church-goer – as faithful as you can be with all the other demands on your time.  And you are not here for recognition or attention; you simply don’t require them.  And you know pain and loss in your life, don’t you?  You know suffering, brokenness and loneliness.  You know what it is like to plead with God for mercy, to make things turn out differently – whatever it is that drove you to your knees.  You know what it feels like to be weak and at the end of your rope.  You know what it feels like to run out of hope.  Maybe you know what it feels like to suspect that God has deserted you.  Maybe you know resignation; maybe despair.  Maybe you know that people attribute virtues to you that you do not think you deserve.

So it’s not that things have always been peachy for you.  You know this, and I know it , too.  You are the widow.

But – I hear you objecting - you are not wealthy, you have enough, generally speaking, but not too much.  You cannot afford to be extravagant.  You are happy to put in your two pennies – even more – but let’s be reasonable; you are no secret millionaire.

Maybe, maybe not.  I have no way of knowing.  Nor does it especially matter to me.

For here is the truth that Jesus is getting at when he points to a widow with her two pennies as an example, for “she, out of her poverty has put in everything she had.”  The wealth of the church lies in the generosity of those who give, and most of us have more to give than we are prepared to.

Interestingly, Jesus does not pull the widow aside and offer her a seminar in estate planning – though I am sure this would have been useful to her.  But he praises her for her generosity in the here and now.   He does not eye her quietly as the potential donor of a planned gift – though I’m sure he would be glad to help her fill out the paperwork to establish a deferred annuity trust (as I would be glad to help any of you do).  But he celebrates her generosity in the moment.

Jesus and the widow know the same thing: that she can afford to give as much as she wants, because everything she has came from God and everything she is going to have comes from God.  And God will provide.  So, sometimes, you just have to feel free in giving it away.

Most of us are relatively stingy, we are the wrong kind of widow – the kinds who hoard it for another day, willing to be praised in death for our careful planning, but not willing to risk being generous in life.

Don’t get me wrong, God accepts both kinds of generosity (and several kinds of credit cards).  But let me ask you this – what is going on with these secret millionaires?  What are they waiting for?  They were never going to use the money for themselves anyway.  It’s only a kind of neurosis that leaves them so rich at the end of their lives.

It is, of course, a lovely thing to be able to leave a generous fortune to your town, your school, your favorite charity… even your church, when you die.  But how much better to also be giving while you are alive.

What a shame that the widows who were secret millionaires never knew the feeling that the widow of Zarephath knew, or the widow with her two pennies in the Gospel.  What a shame they never knew the lightness in your step that you get from giving; never knew how tall they’d stand despite the toll that age had taken on their bones and their stature.

What a shame to sleep on a proverbial mattress full of money, nursing the secret suspicion that God doesn’t care about you, and would never provide for you.

You and I are widows, whose lives have known loss and pain and misery. And by the grace of God we have also known healing and comfort and love.  Maybe we are secret millionaires, maybe not.  Maybe that remains to be seen.  Maybe we have plans to leave a small or a great fortune to the church – that’s OK, I’m not trying to talk you out of it!  But let’s not be the wrong kind of widows.  Let’s not let our planning for death out-do our generosity in life.

And let’s not assume that all will be well when some other widow leaves her fortune to the church.

For you have a fortune, too, maybe smaller than the person next to you, maybe not.  And I have a fortune, too, by the grace of God.  And we can do a lot better than putting two pennies in, but we can’t do any better than that wonderful, anonymous widow who put in everything she had, and then went back to her pew, over in one of the side aisles, and said her prayers quietly, and thanked God for all that he had given her, and determined that next week she’d be back to do the same again, because doing so she felt better, more fully alive, when she gave away more than anyone thought she could afford.  And after all, everything she had came from God, and everything she was going to have would come from God.  And God will provide.  Why not give a goodly portion of it back to the One who gave it to us in the first place?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

11 November 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Phialdelphia

All Saints

A recent book, written by a professor at the Harvard Medical School, purports in its title to provide “Proof of Heaven.”  The author is an experienced and distinguished neurosurgeon who contracted a rare brain illness and fell into a coma for seven days.  I have not read the book, though I’d like to.  I have heard Dr. Eben Alexander talk about his experience in a radio interview, and I must say it is quite remarkable.  According to promotional material for the book, “While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.”

The material difference between Dr. Alexander’s book and another recent book, “Heaven is for Real,” is that the former was written by a neurosurgeon and the latter is the account of a four-year-old boy whose near-death experience is recounted by his father.

Let the reader understand that the neurosurgeon is supposed to have greater credibility than the four-year-old boy.  This seems an open question to me, and perhaps it will seem so to other people of faith, too.  After all, Jesus never said of neurosurgeons that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these, but I verge on digression.

The titles of both books seem to be answering questions that have not actually been on my mind.  Heaven is for Real?  Yes, thank you, I have been working with that assumption for quite a while.  Proof of Heaven was not something I was anxiously awaiting, nor would I have expected a considered treatment of such a thing to come from Harvard Medical School.

St. John the Divine received not a single degree from Harvard, nor is it widely suspected that he was in a coma when his vision of things to come was given to him.  We heard a bit of it tonight, particularly the tantalizing image of “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God….”  This image has captivated the Christian imagination for centuries.  Perhaps part of the reason it has a grip on us is that the old Jerusalem is such a mess – and a useful marker for all the countless other messes we human beings seem to make of things.  And yet we are not without hope for Jerusalem or for ourselves.

Jerusalem, the city that is holy to all three great monotheistic religions, is a place of division, disquiet, and discord.  It did not get this way overnight.  Centuries of warfare, hatred and distrust have contributed to this reality, and there is blame a-plenty to go around on every side.  The point is this: Jerusalem is no heaven.  It is, however, a place where God has chosen repeatedly to make himself known, even to allow his sacred Presence to rest there, where the Temple once stood, in a way that he would no where else rest.  Many of us believe that God’s Divine Presence rests there even now, mysteriously hidden behind the cracks between the stones that once provided the foundation for his holy Temple.

It has never occurred to me that someone might need to prove that God is to be found there by the Western Wall.  Either you believe it or you don’t.  Either you are on the way to believing it, or you are on the way to dismissing it.  Once you were a believer, now you are not.  Once you doubted, but now you believe.  These aspects of faith are not built on proof, and they surely do not require a near death experience of the kinds recounted in the books I mentioned.

Many of us have already come to know that life itself is a near death experience.  Life in this world is never very far from death.  It is a very recent idea – very much promoted, I suspect in places like Harvard Medical School – that life and death are any further away from other than arm’s length.  Most of our ancestors knew better than that.

For two nights of the year the church makes a special effort to re-assert this truth: that life in this world is a near-death experience.  Death comes to us all, and when it does, God has someplace to lead our souls.  I rejoice to think that an ivy league neurosurgeon is able to participate in this revelation – that has also been given to children not yet in kindergarten – that God has another life for us to live in a new Jerusalem where his Divine Presence is also to be found, perhaps more obviously than amongst the mortar and stone of the Western Wall of the old Jerusalem.  These two nights of the Christian year are meant to celebrate, on the one hand the saints whose holiness of life has been rewarded already and who rest in the nearer presence of God’s love in the heavenly regions.  And on the other hand, all the other souls, for whom we think there is work to be done before reaching their heavenly reward.  To my thinking, it is extremely helpful to think that God affords such opportunities to us, the work of his own fingers. He is creating a new Jerusalem for us to make our home; but some of us may get there faster and more easily than others!

In days gone by we used to think of these things in terms of gated communities.  Heaven, on the one hand, where Peter stood by the pearly gates.  And Purgatory, on the other hand, which was its own quite separate neighborhood, and which required a lot of upward mobility if you were ever to find your way out.  (The third option – which includes weeping and gnashing of teeth would seem to involve something more like a cage than a gate – but that’s another sermon.)

These days it seems unwise of many of us to speculate about how God has organized life in the New Jerusalem, which we are told has twelve gates, with walls built of jasper, and a river flowing through the middle of the street.  Organization has never seemed like one of God’s strong suits anyway.  Un-wiser, still to give up hope for such a city that lies beyond the grave, and beyond the end of time.

To the church’s way of thinking, these things require no proof, and are, in fact, un-provable.  So the saints themselves are proof enough – brothers and sisters in Christ who simply lived their lives in such a way as to lift our eyes to heaven and dream of a new Jerusalem.

What a shame it would be if we’d been waiting all this time for the testimony of a neurosurgeon who could attest to what we have known all along, to what the saints themselves point toward.

What a shame it would be if it had required such a brush with death to bring this news at last to the world.

Why should we have to fall into a coma in order to learn what the church long ago taught us: that God made us to be pilgrims who have someplace to go, not only in this life but in the life to come – a lesson the saints have always taught us?  We already know that life is a near-death experience.  Some of us know it better than others.  Some have had to live closer to death than others.

Why should we have to fall into a coma to dream of angels who guide us through the heavenly regions?

Dr. Alexander recounts that after a week of sickness that brought him near death, his eyes popped open, his life was restored, and he was given the gift of a vision of life bigger than he had heretofore imagined.  This story should sound familiar to nearly every Christian – for it is our story.  Some time after losing our innocence we discover that the world around us, or maybe the world inside our own minds, or maybe both, is dark and getting darker.  But our encounter with the living God awakes us from our descent into darkness and shows us a new life, a new reality – tantalizingly real, somehow apparent in this present tense, but not yet ours to claim. entirely. 

The vision of the new Jerusalem changes our lives even though we cannot yet emigrate there.  But the vision has shown us that there are enough gates for four-year-olds and neurosurgeons, and maybe even for Episcopal priests to enter in.  And although I don’t yet know the details, I give thanks for all the saints, who have lived their lives to show you and me the Way.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

All Saints’ Day 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Kingdom of God

Heaven has been much on my mind lately.  Last week we celebrated All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days – both of which invite the mind to consider heaven.  Yesterday we laid to rest a dear and holy member of this parish, whose death put me in mind of heaven.  So, thoughts of heaven have been very present to me this past week or so.

You might think that today’s Gospel reading is about heaven.  Today we hear Jesus responding to a question from a religious leader – which is the greatest commandment.  And Jesus gives an entirely uncontroversial answer.  He gives, in fact, the correct answer – for this was a question not of opinion, but of commitment to established biblical teaching.  The Jewish tradition already knew where in Torah the answer to this question was to be found – which is the greatest commandment.  It’s not even a hard question, it’s a little like asking what are the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer; even if you don’t know how it continues, you could probably come up with “Our Father.”

An interesting thing happens in this little discussion between Jesus and the un-named scribe.  Since the scribe asked the question, you’d think it would be him who evaluated Jesus’ answer.  But in the matter of just a few sentences, St. Mark makes it clear that in fact, Jesus is now judging the reaction of the scribe, and judging it quite positively, since the scribe agrees with Jesus.  And Jesus says to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

In the Gospels we often hear the terms “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven” used interchangeably.  Because of this mix of terminology, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that Jesus is talking about that misty place beyond the clouds where we tell children people go after they die.  But this is not quite right.  When Jesus said to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God,” he was not telling him that death was imminent.  It’s more like he was telling him, “You’re getting warmer…”

You remember how we did this when we were kids and our brother or sister was looking for something that we’d hidden.  “You’re getting colder,” we’d say as they moved away from the concealed object.  “You’re getting warmer,” we’d tell them as they moved toward the closet where it was hidden, or under the sofa, or wherever.

Jesus’ ministry was always about the kingdom of God.  So many times in his encounters with religious leaders, he’d had to say to them, “You’re getting colder.”  But here, rehearsing the greatest commandment to love God and love your neighbor, and remembering its preeminence among all the other rules of Jewish law, it delights Jesus to say to the scribe, “You’re getting warmer, warmer, warmer… you’re boiling hot now!”

These days we have forgotten so much about the kingdom of God, we confuse it with heaven – and often think of it as nothing more than a great retirement community in the sky, where the food is better than average, and the weather is better than Florida.  But when we think this way, we are only getting colder.  Jesus is not teaching about what happens to us in the life to come, he is teaching about life in this world.  He is not talking about a reward that awaits us after death, he is talking about a way of living on this side of the grave.  And when we begin to suspect that this talk about the kingdom of God has something to do with how we live our lives in the here and now, then we are getting much warmer.  Remember that John the Baptist came proclaiming the kingdom of God, and Jesus did the same.  This was the message they both began with: the kingdom of God has come near.  But what does this mean?  What are we supposed to do about it?

These days the church cannot escape the temptation to speak of our work in terms of commerce.  We talk about church shopping, marketing, and we often say that we have to be clear about what kind of religion we are selling.  I don’t much like the analogies from which that language springs, but if we must borrow our language and thinking from commerce, then I think we’d do much better to think in terms of construction than selling.  (Oh, I know they are related, but work with me here.)  For we have been called to build up the kingdom of God in this world.  This is our mission and our daily concern in the church.  How can we build up the kingdom of God?

Please note that this is not a call to establish a theocratic state, nor an insistence that America is a Christian nation, nor an assertion of so-called biblical ethics, nor a demand that the Ten Commandments be hung on the walls of our courthouses.  In all these endeavors, I fear, we’d be getting colder.

There are two phases in building up the kingdom of God, but it’s OK if they happen out of sequence.  Phase One is to worship the one, true, and living God, that is, to love him with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  Phase Two is to love your neighbor as yourself, which is to say, follow the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do for you.  When we do this, we are getting warmer.

You would not think these two phases would be hard to manage – especially since the order of them doesn’t much matter – begin with Phase Two and then move on to Phase One: it’s OK!  But the story of faith - for both Jews and Christians – has been a story of struggle to be attentive to these two phases of building up the kingdom of God.

I’m sometimes asked these days, about the state of health of the Episcopal Church – which has been rife with conflict, lawsuits, discord, and decline over the past few decades.  Will we survive?  Will the Anglican Communion, of which we are a part, also survive, since it, too, faces many struggles?

How can we answer these questions?  Who knows what will become of our institutions?  Not me.  These are tricky questions, that, I guess require tricky answers, which I sometimes feel able to take a stab at.  But there is a less tricky answer to be given in response to whether or not our church structures will survive and grow: that depends on how much we want to work to build up the kingdom of God.  Because the kingdom of God is very near you right now, and building it up is all about what we do in this life, not about what happens to us in the life to come.

It sometimes feels to us as though we ourselves or the church at large is getting colder about all this – moving further and further away from building up the kingdom of God.  And I think you know it when you feel it.  I tend to feel this way – as if we are getting colder – at committees, and meetings and councils of the church where talk is cheap and plentiful.  And I feel we are getting warmer whenever we are doing things that seem to echo with the great commandment to love God and love his neighbor.

Many of you know by know my recitation of the things we do that get us warmer:  when we are at prayer or worship, or our voices are raised in song; when we are caring for the homeless and the hungry; when we are taking old things and making them new, giving them new life; when we are feeding one another at our tables; when we are attentive to the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, and the dying.

This Parish was built to be a place that knew the kingdom of God was very near, not beckoning us beyond the grave.  It was built to be a place where people could get warmer, warmer, warmer, even boiling hot in their search for God.  And I pray that it will always be so.

Next week, I can promise you, when I stand in the pulpit, I will be talking about money – I have been reading ahead and I happen to know that the Gospel invites me to do so.  And besides, next Sunday is Commitment Sunday when we make our pledges of financial support to the Parish.  I am regularly encouraged – and there are times when I am sure that this encouragement is right – to follow the examples of professional fund raisers, since there is an entire industry of people out there who are trying to get you to give your money to various causes.  And there are times, when I think it is a good idea to take this advice, to follow the best practices of fund raising, so that we can be accountable and successful in what we do.

But more urgently, I am called to remind you of the kingdom of God, which we are asked to build up in the here and now.  This is holy work that you and I have been called to do, and we can only do it together.  It delights me to know that year after year we seem to be getting warmer and warmer as we work for the kingdom of God in this place, as we remember that it is not some distant cloudy land that we will wander through in robes of white when the last trumpet has sounded.  But the kingdom of God is near you – it is here, it is now.

Everything we do, we do for this kingdom, out of love for its king, who gave us every gift, and who lived and died for us and rose from the dead, that our lives might be shaped not by the forces of this world, but by the commandments of a greater kingdom, where we are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all souls, all our strength, and all our mind.  This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets, and on their foundations we are building the kingdom of God, by his grace!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

4 November 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Move Along

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

I wonder how long he’d been sitting there. Had he been there all day, in the dust and the warm spring sun? I wonder if this was the spot he always sat in, his spot, the smooth stone of the city wall worn away into a comfortable curve by the leaning of his back, the smells and sounds of the city gate familiar and homey. I wonder how he found his way there. Did a friend or a neighbor lead him there at daybreak? Or did he find his way there himself in the dewy early-morning, the path made familiar by day after day of sleepy, heavy-eyed travel – walk slowly to the smell of Miriam’s freshly baking bread, turn right when you hear Hiram’s donkey braying in his stable, watch the step up near the bubbling waters at the mikvah, and finally slide yourself into your spot along the road, your place of begging business, your tiny crease in the busy world.

I wonder if, when he sat alone by the roadside, he spent time trying to remember what the world looked like. He hadn’t always been blind, you see. He had once seen the soaring starkness of skinny palm trees, the vastness of a solid blue sky, the infinite smallness of the first star on a dark, cloudless night. He had once marveled at the sights of the world and all that was in it – at the way his honorable father’s eyes had twinkled when teasing his mother, at the tiny wrinkles in the knuckles of his baby sister, of the brightness of a smile and the curve of a shoulder and the flash of sunlit hair. But all that had been years ago, and even though sometimes he was sure that his dreams had been full of color, when he woke he couldn’t quite remember green, or the rich ruby glow of wine, or the shade of his own golden-brown skin.

I wonder what they sounded like on that day. Surely he heard them coming – first the scattershot of voices carried by the wind, then the buzz and hum of a band of country pilgrims headed on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem for Passover. Did he sit up right away, arranging his face into just the right combination of kindness and need, draping his empty cloak over his lap to catch the coins tossed from generous hands? Or did he wait a moment, knowing that he would hear the difference in sound when the crowd rounded the bend in the road and could see him, taking those few extra seconds to linger in the cool curve of the stone behind him?

I wonder when he noticed the sound change, when he heard the buzz and hum grow into a roar. When did he realize that this was more than just a few families of pilgrims, that it was an enormous crowd – men and women and children, with accents from all over the land, their bodies buzzing with an excitement that made his own heart beat faster in his chest. I wonder how he knew that it was Jesus of Nazareth who was passing by. Did he hear snippets of conversation from the crowd, murmurings of dead children raised and live children embraced and bread broken and multiplied and shared? Did he catch the disciples still arguing over who was the favorite? Or did he just feel it when the Lord walked by – a stillness in the air that made his breath catch in his throat, a warmth like the sun on his upturned face?

I wonder what made him cry out. Where did that courage come from in the heart of this man who had always played by society’s rules, begged by the roadside like a good beggar should, lived in corners and darkness like a good blind man should? What did his voice sound like when he shouted down the road, his face turned to the place where that warmth had been? Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Did he even hear the crowds telling him to shut up, or was all he could hear his own desperate rasp of a cry and the pounding of his own heart? Again and again, Son of David, have mercy on me, have mercy on me, stop, stop and come back.

I wonder what it sounded like when the crowd shuffled and slowed and stopped. What did it feel like to have hundreds of people hushed and quiet, their attention focused on him as he waited, his ears straining to hear anything, his face turned, his body leaning into the place where that presence had passed by, waiting, longing. And then, a whisper coming down the lane, he is calling you, take heart, take courage, get up, you blind man, get up and go.

I wonder what it felt like to move, to feel the scratch of his woolen cloak as it slid off his knees, to hear the thump and jingle of coins as they fell to the ground, unheeded and unnecessary. What did it feel like to move out onto the road, to hurry down the path, sensing the still, expectant bodies all around, drawn along only by that presence, that warmth, that something out there. I wonder if it felt good – stretching out his legs, stretching out his arms, searching for this new thing, fearless in the face of his faith in this Jesus, standing directly in the Son, feeling this calm, warm, holy presence right before him.

I wonder what he thought when Jesus asked him what he wanted. Was it a thousand separate images of father and mother and family and bread and sky? Or was it just one word: green? I want green again. I want to see again, rabbi, and then the sound of those words – go, go on, your faith has made you well, and suddenly a flood of colors, the road and the trees and the sky in a tumble of greens and blues and dusty brown feet and bright white smiles. And the man standing before him with dark eyes as rich as wine. I wonder what it felt like to watch that man smile, turn his face towards Jerusalem and move along down the road, to feel the crowds begin to move along with him. I wonder what it felt like to choose: to look back at his place of sitting and to then turn away – to leave his cloak and his coins and his comfy cool curve of stone and to move along, to follow this man wherever he was going, whenever he might get there, however his life might be forever and forever changed.

I wonder where we find ourselves in this story. I wonder if today this Gospel is inviting us to draw near to Bartimaeus, to find ourselves at his side, to recognize something of ourselves in the man who has spent his life sitting in one place. After all, we find our way to this place by the same old sounds and smells – wake up and walk straight until you smell the incense, turn right when you hear the rustle of choir robes, slide yourself into the comfort of your pew. We lean back into the curve of this familiar worship, of our familiar prayer practices and scripture study and stewardship and service, day after day. And that sitting still, that sameness, that little crease of faith in a hectic and busy world can feel stable and steady and reassuring. But I wonder if this Gospel is inviting us into more, encouraging us, too, to take heart, get up, and move along. I wonder if this Gospel is reminding us that discipleship is not really about sitting still.       

This is not to say that we shouldn’t fully embrace the familiarity of this worship, of our prayer and study and stewardship and service. How in the world could I stand in the pulpit at Saint Mark’s Church and say that? No, these familiar practices are critical to the life of discipleship. But just because our practices are the same every day doesn’t mean that our faith should be the same every day as well. In fact, these practices of discipleship are important not because they help us to sit still, but because they help us to move – to notice Christ’s presence, to summon the courage to call out for his mercy, to hear his voice calling us to something new. And he is always calling us to something new. Why would we ever imagine that God would call us only once? Why would we ever imagine that God’s process of transformation would simply stop? God wants more for us – more of us – than that. Our discipleship is a journey; it is “the way” not “the destination.” It is a path, a process, not a place where one hangs a plaque and says, Here I will sit from now until eternity. We are called by Christ again, and again, to come close to him, to learn to see the world anew, and to move along.  

I wonder what it would feel like to move – to leap up from where we are now in our faith, in our discipleship, in our stewardship, and to move along the road. Perhaps you already feel like you’re already there, that, like Bartimaeus, you’re being transformed daily, that you’re moving along each and every moment because it just feels too good to stop. But for those times when you feel like you haven’t moved in a long time, when you feel like your faith has been sitting steady but perhaps a bit stale, remember – God is making all things new. God is present, here, on this road, loving you and longing to transform you – your call, your eyes, your faith, your whole life, this whole world. So lean in. Listen for that whisper down the lane, “Get up! Take heart! He is calling you.” I wonder what it would feel like to hear that voice this morning and to spring up and to move.                

Note: I am much indebted to Jerome Berryman and the Godly Play curriculum for the language of this sermon. The "wondering" comes from him!

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

28 October 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

They Cast Their Nets

You may listen to Father Phelps's sermon here.

Preached by Father Nicholas Phelps

21 October 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Eye of the Needle

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Imagine that you are surrounded by a spectacularly beautiful mountain landscape: a stream is gurgling not too far away; the sun is shining; perfect, fluffy, white clouds are floating along in the clear, blue sky; the air is crisp and clean.  All is wonderful in this sylvan scene… except that you are carrying on your back a backpack loaded with your tent, your sleeping bag, your clothes, your food and your water.  And the bag is heavy.  And you are hiking uphill.  And you have been doing this for a week, or ten days, or maybe two weeks.  This was the scene one day this past July when I was hiking in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.  I am 45 years old.  Let’s not guess just exactly how many extra pounds I am already carrying around my middle.  Let’s just say that most days the loudest sound I could hear as I hiked was my own labored breathing: in and out, in and out, as I tried to suck the oxygen out of the thin mountain air.

On my worst day of hiking – my unhappiest day, when every muscle ached, and I wanted only to sit and rest, but I was looking up to a mountain pass that I could not imagine ever reaching – a thought ran through my head as I grumbled to myself, and wondered if I could really make it.  I was aware of how long the hike was (211 miles), of how heavy my pack was (something like 30 pounds or more), and how overweight and out of shape I am (I thought we agreed not to be precise about that), and I listened to my breathing (in and out, in and out)…  and the thought that ran through my head was this:  “You did this to yourself.”  No one else had let me get so out of shape.  No one else had forced me to take this hike.  No one else had packed my bag.  I was responsible for every ounce of unhappiness I was experiencing.  I did it to myself, and there was no one to be angry or upset with other than me.

There had been another day with a moment of unhappiness, when my companions and I were hiking up a steep ridge where several trees had fallen directly across the trail, making it very difficult to ascend.  In one place there was a very large tree that had fallen across the trail at a steep angle.  I tried to climb over the tree, grabbing its branches to try to hoist my self and my backpack across its big rounded trunk.  But the tree was too big and the tangle of branches too thick to get up and over.  It looked as though hikers before me had instead chosen to duck beneath the tree, going just downhill of the path and squeezing themselves, and their backpacks between the steep mountainside and the rough tree.  There was a gap there that looked as though a small child with a bookbag might make it through.  But I could not imagine how I would get underneath with my backpack.  I was tired, and frustrated from not having made it over the tree.  I was annoyed that my smaller, lighter, and younger hiking companions had already cleared this obstacle and were now well ahead of me.  I was nervous about losing my footing.  And I was sure I would not fit underneath the tree.

So I got down on my belly, my face nearly in the dirt.  And I reached my hands out in front of me and started to pull myself forward on the sloping mountainside, underneath the fallen tree trunk.  I felt the top of my backpack hit the trunk above me, and my momentum stopped.  I scrunched myself down into the dirt to try to get lower, and I pulled myself again, and I felt my backpack reluctantly scrape along the bark of the tree as I managed to get myself most of the way under.  Another pull, and at last I made it through to the other side of the tree.  My knees were scraped, I was covered in dirt, I was breathing even harder than usual, but I was past the obstacle.  I adjusted my pack on my back and I looked up, for the trail kept going up, and I continued on my way.  I did it to myself.

I was not thinking at the time about the Gospel of Mark.  But come to think of it, very few people that I know believe in the Gospel by the time they get to the portion of the 10^th chapter we read this morning.  Very few Christians can see the value in Jesus’ teaching here, and most of us are eager to ignore it, to explain it away, or stash it in whatever drawer we stashed Jesus’ teaching that we should love our enemies: the “useless drawer” where we put other useless things.

Today’s gospel reading might as well go into the useless drawer: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  Haven’t you and I long ago consigned this passage to the useless drawer?  Only holy people – monks and nuns – believe this stuff, and they are either crazy or stupid, or there is something else wrong with them (we must assume).  For no one in his right mind does anything other than what the man in the story does: turn his or her back on Jesus and walk away from him when told to sell everything and give the money to the poor.  Except in our case we do not turn away from Jesus sorrowfully, because, really, what is he, crazy?

Remember me trying to get underneath that tree?  Do you know what never occurred to me?  Do you know what thought never crossed my mind?  This one: take the pack off your back.  You are carrying too much and it makes it hard to go forward, so take the pack off your back.

Now, normally I would think that that’s a metaphor for repentance or forgiveness or grief, or some other spiritual virtue, some inner conflict or turmoil that it’s hard to let go of.  And I would say to gently, why don’t you take the pack off your back?  Let Jesus carry it?  But I had my stuff in my backpack: the things I needed.  My life.  You don’t just take that off your back.

I played a little thought experiment the other day when reflecting about my hiking trip and this gospel reading.  I asked myself to imagine that I had been hiking with a backpack full of money, and that I could keep as much money as I could carry up those mountains.  I’d have killed myself to drag it all up there!  I’d have starved and dehydrated myself to make room for more cash in my bag.  And you could have pushed trees down in front of me and I’d have crawled under them.

And I think I actually stand pretty loosely to money.  I give a fair amount of it away.  I am not very motivated by it.  I have chosen, more or less, a life with limited earning potential.  But if you’d told me I could keep a bag stuffed with money as long as I could hike uphill with it on my back for three weeks …I’d give that serious consideration.

I’d want to know what the denominations of the bills were, of course.

I’d want twenties… at least.

When the man asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life, do you remember what Jesus did?  Saint Mark tells us that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him…”  He loved him.  This means that this un-named, unknown, never-to-be-seen-again man is in the same category as Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead!  He loved him.  This is not insignificant. 

Jesus loves you, too.  He is going to raise you from the dead.  OK, that’s later.  But now, he loves you and me, and does he also want us to hear what the un-named, unknown, never-to-be-seen-again man heard?  “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me”?

But we don’t really want to take our backpacks off, do we?

No, we do not.  We would rather scrape our way along the dirt to try to squeeze through the eye of the needle, than risk leaving our money behind.  I know I would.  And many of us would just decide that it was a better idea to turn back whence we came.  Maybe the only reason I kept going is because there were two guys ahead of me, and didn’t want to lose them.  Maybe otherwise I’d have turned around, marched to the bottom of the mountain and ordered myself a beer.

Money has a grip on us – on you and on me – and it is not letting go.  And neither are we, just yet.

And here’s the thing: it seldom occurs to any of us to take the backpack off.  It is almost unthinkable that we could do without, manage with less, or give it all away.  Let Warren Buffet do that, or Gerry Lenfest, we think.  They have plenty to spare.  But I’ll keep my backpack on, thank you very much.

Now some of you, maybe you need to be careful this way.  There are people who worship in this church week by week, I know, who really don’t have much at all in their packs, and they need to hold onto it.  But not so many of us fall into that category.  Most of us are rich by nearly any measure.  Which means that Jesus is talking to us.  Jesus loves us.  And he hardly ever had a good thing to say about the rich except this: from those to whom much is given, much will be expected – which Google may tell you is an anonymous quotation, but which is actually found in the 48^th verse of the 12^th chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke.

We forget where it came from because it has been filed in the useless drawer.  Just like the Gospel reading today: useless.

Here’s another thing we don’t believe:  Money can’t buy happiness.  Hah!  Most of us strongly suspect that money can indeed buy happiness.  And the more of it you have the happier you will be, we strongly suspect.  And it certainly seems that money buys the things that go with happiness.  But you know what money doesn’t do?  Money doesn’t make it easier to climb mountains; which is to say: to pass through the eye of the needle.

I suspect that most of us are going to leave this Gospel passage in the useless drawer for a good while longer.  I suspect that we have already turned away from it, for we have many possessions, most of us.  So we have taken the passage out for its requisite fifteen minutes and it can go back in the drawer for another year, or whatever.  But if, like me, you suspect, that Jesus actually said this for a reason, that he meant it, and that it could, in fact, be mysterious and wonderful kind of Good News that we have just not figured out yet, I have a suggestion:

Let’s practice giving our money away.

You can try when the plate is passed around the church later on in Mass.  Will you let it go by?  Or will you put something in it?  A dollar, a five, ten, twenty?  Even if you already pay your pledge by check, or credit card?  Practice giving it away.

You can practice by giving a dollar to a person on the street, whom you would normally pass by.

You can practice by taking home a pledge card and thinking about how much money you can give to Saint Mark’s, and the adding a little bit to what you think would be a reasonable amount.

Wait! you’ll say.  Jesus didn’t say to give your money to the church; he said to give it to the poor!

And I stand proudly by this parish’s record of work with and for the poor and the needy: thirty-plus years of the Food Cupboard, eight years of feeding the hungry on Saturday mornings, two years, now of St. James School – which only serves the neediest families, two free medical clinics in Honduras. 

And yes, we have lots of other bills to pay too, but I promise you that when you give, we can and do more and better ministry with the poor.

Practice giving your money away.  Practice with me, because it’s good for you, as it is for me.

Practice giving your money away because it is part growing up spiritually, and outgrowing a kind of bondage that money traps so many of us in.

Practice giving your money away, because otherwise, I promise you, you are going to get stuck, under a tree, or in the eye of the needle.  Or worse yet, you will never even start the journey, and you will go home sorrowful.

On my hike, I eventually made it up to the mountain pass that day.  And then up and over successive mountain passes day after day for three weeks, until finally we reached the top of Mount Whitney, which is the highest mountain in the continental US: 14,500 feet.  I’d call that a useful metaphor for the kingdom of God – no place higher to go!

How hard it is to get through the eye of a needle when we are not willing to let go of our money.  But I promise you, if the view from the top f Mount Whitney bears even the tiniest resemblance to the view from the kingdom of God: it is worth it!

Look up!  The kingdom of God beckons!  And nothing can stop you, except you, yourself!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

14 October 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Speaking In Extremes

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

My mother was good at many things. She was an enthusiastic and creative teacher. She was a beautiful public speaker. She made a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And she was a dedicated and consistent speech temper-er. If my brother or I said something that she considered to be too extreme, especially too extremely negative, she would jump in right away to temper what we’d said. “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” she’d say. And then she’d suggest something she thought was more appropriate. An example, as I was pouting after banging away at a difficult piece on the piano: “You don’t mean that you hate this piece, honey; it’s just not your favorite.” Mom liked gentle speech – we couldn’t hate something or wish we would just die or never, ever, ever do something again. She would always try to moderate our extremes, temper our bitter words with a touch of sweetness, encourage speech that was a little softer, a little nicer. “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” she’d say. And most of the time, she was exactly right.                

Maybe some of you have mothers like this. And maybe it’s because of mothers like this that I find myself wondering what Mary was thinking while Jesus was giving this charming little speech in today’s Gospel, how she was feeling when Jesus suddenly started talking about chopping off body parts. “Oh, Jeshua,” I can hear her saying, “you don’t really mean cut off your own foot; you mean watch out for where that foot might take you.” And, “Now, honey, wouldn’t it be nicer to say something like, ‘Try to look only at beautiful and holy things’ rather than telling people to gouge their eyes out?” You don’t really mean that, Jesus, I can hear her saying.

And the truth is, she’s right. He probably didn’t really mean what he was saying. Everyone who reads this passage can see that Jesus is using this extreme speech to make a dramatic point. He’s practicing the art of hyperbole, standing in a long line of Biblical figures who valued and carefully crafted the skill of purposeful exaggeration. We hear the same kind of extreme speech from Moses when he was confronted with the whining Israelite rabble: “Look, God, did I conceive all this people? Am I their babysitter now? If you seriously expect me to find meat to feed this bunch of babies, if this is how you value our relationship, then just kill me now. Take me. Out of. My. Misery.” This is the tradition of intentional exaggeration that Jesus has inherited, the kind of speech that Jesus is putting to work here. It would be better for you, he says, to be drowned in the sea than to turn another person away from me by your actions. It would be better to cut off one of your own limbs than to allow it to trip you up in your own discipleship. In other words: stay out of the way. Better to be drowned, or to go about life maimed, lame, or half-blind than to get in the way of your own faith or anyone else’s.

So yes, we’re on fairly safe ground not taking this text too literally. After all, we don’t hear about the great mass limb-chopping before the day of Pentecost, or of the band of one-eyed Christians who stumbled their way around Asia Minor because they had no depth perception. It’s safe to say that this extreme language is intended to make a point. It’s safe to say, “Okay, Jesus, we know that isn’t really what you meant, so we’re going to soften up your language just a bit.” How about, “Keep an eye out, Christians, for the things that get in the way of belief.”

But it is profoundly unsafe to let this word-tempering turn into a habit. We get ourselves into trouble when we start applying this tempering technique willy nilly, when we let our discomfort with other extreme things that Jesus said push us to try to find nicer, more appropriate, more doable, alternatives to them as well. And we do this all the time. We don’t mean to, and sometimes we aren’t even aware of it, but we do. We take “love your enemies” and say, well, maybe not “love” maybe just “be nice to” or at least “don’t be mean to.” And maybe not really your enemies but just the people who slightly annoy you. We hear “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel,” and we soften it to “Go to people who are already kind of receptive and try to casually slip the Gospel into the conversation.” We translate “do this in remembrance of me” into “do this when it is convenient for you.” We temper “take up your cross and follow me” and “feed the hungry,” and “love one another as I have loved you.” We don’t mean to, but we do. We let our own discomfort with this kind of extreme speech push us into trying to soften these words, into trying to make this speech more digestible, more politically correct, more socially acceptable.

The trouble is that Jesus spoke in extremes all of the time, and most of the time, he meant what he said. Sure, he may have spoken in hyperbole and stretched the metaphor to drive home his point from time to time, but not all the time. Love your enemies was not an exaggeration. I am the resurrection and the life was not hyperbole. Take, eat this in remembrance of me was not a suggestion. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all is not an example of extreme speech that needs to be softened. And – and this is important – our level of discomfort is not actually a good indicator of when we should start tempering this bold speech. Some of Jesus’ words might make us uncomfortable, but that in itself isn’t a good enough reason to discount them. We are asked, we are commanded to listen to them anyway.

And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re actually asked to do more than just listen to these words of extreme love, extreme forgiveness, extreme mercy and truth and grace – we are asked to live these words, and we are asked to repeat them ourselves over and over and over again. We are asked to use this kind of extreme speech in our own lives, not to temper the way we speak about God to others or to ourselves. We are commanded to proclaim the Gospel with boldness, to boast in the cross of Christ, to visibly embrace the utter foolishness of God made man. If we don’t do this, if we don’t speak with the same strong words that Jesus did, then who in the world is going to listen to us? If the Gospel that we present to the world is merely lukewarm, then it’s no wonder that people will spit it out of their mouths. And, what’s worse, if we choose to do this – to speak in half-truths that are softened so as not to offend, or tempered so as not to make anyone uncomfortable – then guess what? We are setting ourselves up as dozens of little stumbling blocks to all of those people out there who would come to know Christ but simply need a compelling invitation. And you know what that means. It would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and be thrown into the sea, it would be better for you to try to drive west on the Schuylkill Expressway at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, it would be better for you to get stuck behind a Cowboys fan at the Linc, than to put a stumbling block before any and all of these little ones.

Now here is the good news. Right now, everyone in this church has the chance to get rid of the millstone. Because your stewardship committee has asked you to bring a friend to church on the second Sunday of October. This is the perfect opportunity to practice your extreme speech. And I do mean practice. You may need to actually stand in front of the mirror and watch the words fall out of your mouth. Words like: “You know, neighbor, when I serve soup to the homeless at Saint Mark’s, I actually see Christ in the eyes of those I feed. Would you like to come with me on Saturday?” Or: “You know, Dad, I can’t do an early brunch with you on Sunday because Sundays are holy days for me. Worship at Saint Mark’s grounds me and names me and sends me – would you like to come with me this week and we could do brunch afterwards?” Or: “You know, mother-of-playdate-friend, growing my children in the knowledge of God’s love for them is hugely important to me, and my church really helps me to do that. Would you like to come to our Family Mass and Schola with my family next Sunday?” Or: “You know, work colleague, I find God when I hear the choir offer their praises and prayers. Come hear them – and God – with me.”

This extreme speech – this strong, bold, radical speech – pleases God. These are words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts that are pleasing and acceptable in God’s sight. When we feel and speak in this way, not only do we remove the stumbling blocks from our own faith and from those we meet, we actually imitate Christ. And then the speech becomes not simply our own but the word of God made living and active in our mouths. God speaks in us when we speak this way, draws close to us to guide and strengthen us in our speaking. So we have two weeks – be bold in your speech, be extreme, and smile as you say that yes, that holy speech is exactly what you really, really mean.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

30 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The Missing Generations

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

For something like 50 to 100 years – it’s actually hard to say how long – various policies throughout the states of Australia resulted in the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families of origin.  There is not easy consensus about what the purposes of such policies were, and some people implausibly deny that they were ever in place.  Some say that the policies were there to protect the children from neglect; others say it was to preserve their Aboriginal heritage; still others say it was to “civilize” a race of people that was not as technologically advanced as the Europeans who had by then long ago claimed Australia as their own.

One reason for removing indigenous children from the bosoms of their families, however, seems to be wrapped up in the perverse thinking of eugenics: through generations of inter-marriage with fairer skinned people and generations of socialization in European customs, this thinking went, you could “eliminate the full-blood and permit the white admixture to half-castes and eventually the race will become white,” according to one of the policy’s best-known proponents.[i]

The children taken during these decades came to be known as the Stolen Generations – and no one really knows quite how many children were indeed stolen.  Can you imagine what it was like?  Here’s how one member of a stolen generation described what happened:

“I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie. They put us in the police [car] and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we'd gone [about ten miles] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers' backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.”[ii]  And so it was that several generations of children were taken from their own families to grow up in orphanages and schools other institutions, some of them run by the churches of Australia.  And generations of Aboriginal families were deprived of their own children.

Of course, the policies were not only misguided and cruel, they did not succeed in eliminating the indigenous peoples of the Australian continent, who have never fared very well since Europeans came to those beautiful shores with their supposedly superior culture.  To this day Aboriginal Australians often suffer the same kinds of indignities that Native Americans suffer on our own continent: unusually high rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and, of course, the loss of the lands and customs that sustained their lives for generations past.

But I digress.  For, today the Gospel compels us to think about children.  We find Jesus’ disciples engaged in an activity that adults have perfected – arguing about who is greatest, which is a way of saying that they were wrangling over power.  Knowing something about power, Jesus wants to teach them.  So he scurries off for a moment, and then comes back to the house where they are all gathered.  He has with him a child – maybe it’s an infant, or a toddler, but I like to think it’s a child a little bit older, say, a middle-school-aged child.  “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” he says to them.  And then, he takes the child in his arms.  If it’s small enough, he is cradling it in his arms.  Or, if the child is a little older, perhaps he bounces the boy or girl on his knee.  If the child is a little older still, standing beside him, Jesus wraps his arms around his or her shoulders, and draws the child close to him as he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.”

This is a recurring theme in the Gospels – not only the lesson that the first shall be last, etc, but also the instruction, the command, the imperative (you might say) to welcome children.  It’s a lesson most forcefully and memorably taught by Jesus when his disciples are yelling at people for bringing their children into the presence of the great teacher, and they are telling the people to take their kids away and get out of the way.  But Jesus intervenes and says, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”  The disciples meant well, but they were wrong – not just because Jesus made it permissible to bring children into his presence, but because children have a privileged place in his heart, and in the kingdom of God.

I sometimes think of those generations of stolen indigenous Australian children, ripped from the arms of their mothers, tossed into the backs of pick-up trucks, and then hidden away till they could somehow blend in wit the rest of white Australian society.  And sometimes I think about this parish, which I love, and about parish churches like it, and I wonder, who stole our children?

There are entire generations of children missing from the life of the church in many places, certainly it is the case here in this parish.  The children were not taken from us forcibly – it was all much more subtle.  In urban churches, like ours, it was linked to the flight of so many families from the cities to the suburbs.  And then, of course, the loss of Sundays as free, un-programmed time, protected for worship and family togetherness.  The church has proved to be a weak attraction compared to softball leagues, and football games, and Sunday brunches.  But we didn’t shoo the kids away, as the disciples did; we just woke up on successive Sunday mornings and found that they were simply missing.  We may have wondered who took them, but what could we do?

At Saint Mark’s, for decades now, we have tried to make the best of it – enormously grateful for those few families with their children who stalwartly remain – but generally learning to cope without the children, filling the roles they once filled with adults, as necessary, and keeping just enough small-sized vestments around to fit the occasional boat boy, as a reminder to us – since those boat boys and girls look so right in this place, so much like they belong here – a reminder to us of the missing generations.

There’s something awkward in the passage of Mark’s Gospel that we heard today that may contain a lesson for us.  Mark is very specific that Jesus and his disciples are gathered in a house, as Jesus talks with them, but I doubt that there is a child sitting there in the house with them.  Jesus must have gotten up to go get a child.  Did he go to another part of the house?  Or out into the street?  Who knows?  But I feel certain that Jesus had to get up from where he was sitting and go get the child that he put in the midst of his disciples in order to teach them a lesson.

Perhaps part of the lesson for us in this Gospel passage comes from asking, “Where did the child come from?”  It’s a form of the question I ask around here, “Where will the children come from?”  It’s all fine and well to say that children ought to be a part of the church, after all, but where will they come from?  Out of thin air?

Well, where did the child come from that Jesus put in the midst of his disciples?  Jesus went to find the child, and he brought her in.

My brothers and sisters, our children are missing.  They have been taken from us by forces that we often think are more powerful than we are.  And in so many cases their entire families have gone with them.

Our children are missing, and they are being deprived of a Christian heritage: of the Christian story, of the Christian sacraments, of the Christian community, of the Christian life – all of which are good and useful and holy.

Our children are missing, and after all, the church hasn’t shown herself to be an unreliable care-taker of children?  There are those who are ready to say what a good thing it is that the children are missing from the church.

Our children are missing, which puts us in peril if we truly care about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven, and whoever welcomes a child welcomes not just the child, but Jesus.

Entire generations of our children are missing from the church – including the present generation.  It’s been no one’s policy.  No bands of policemen have gathered them up and carted them off.  They are not locked up in a cell somewhere.  They have not been taken by force from their mothers’ sides.  But they have been seamlessly assimilated into a society that either thinks it has outgrown the kingdom of God, or would rather turn its back on the kingdom of God.

Our children are missing, but we cannot really point to anyone else, and say, “It’s your fault.”  Because the children were missing when Jesus gathered the disciples in that house in Capernaum, too.  The disciples, after all, were planning their own futures, designing their own vestments, arguing over who was the greatest, who would sit at the Lord’s right hand.

I wonder how they arranged themselves in that house, after their discussion – how did they jostle to get the best seat, beside the Teacher?  How awkward was it for them when he got up from their gathering and left them to sit there alone with each other?

How long was he gone?  Did he just go to the next room and find a child sitting there in its mother’s lap?  Or did he go out the front door and ask one, then another passer-by if he could borrow her child for just a moment?  Or did he bring the mother in with him too, and ask her to join them?

Why did they think he had brought a child into their august gathering?  Children can be disruptive, after all.  And they thought they were doing just fine without children; they thought it was best to keep the children at bay.  Let them come to Jesus when they are grown up, they thought.  They had no idea that the children were missing from their midst; they had thought they were doing alright without them.  But they were wrong.

So Jesus went to find a child and hold her in his arms.

My friends, if your children were missing you would go out and look for them.  You would not sleep till they had been found, you would not rest till they were warmly tucked in their beds, you would not leave any stone unturned in your search for them.

If your children were missing you would find them and bring them home.

Well, my friends, our children are missing.  To welcome them is to welcome not only Jesus, but to open our lives to the whole presence of God, to welcome the one who sent him. 

Our children are missing.  Are we just going to sit here?  Or shall we go together and find them?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

23 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

---

[i] A.O. Neville in The West Australian, 1930

[ii] The Stolen Generation, by Peter Read, a report to the Dept. of Aboriginal Affairs of the Government of New South Wales

Just a Teacher

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

One day this past week, while I was walking on Rittenhouse Square taking care of some errands, I came up on a young man who was obviously just out enjoying the day – strolling around, looking up at the sky, even whistling a little bit. As I passed by him, he took a long look at me in my collar and got a huge grin on his face. I’ve seen this happen enough to know what was coming next, and sure enough, he drew up next to me and asked me one of the two questions that I get here in Philadelphia at least once or twice a week: “Are you a priestess?” (If you’re wondering, the other question is “What are you?”) I laughed and said that he was close – I was a priest, actually, not a priestess, which for me always conjures up images of grey robes and standing stones and someone singing Casta diva. What he said next was completely unexpected. “You have too many crucifixes in your church!” Now he didn’t know which parish I serve, and if I worked in some other church in this city I might have been able to respond to this by saying, “Well, no, actually we don’t.” But seeing as I am a priest here, I just said, “Well, that’s interesting. Why do you say that?” To which he replied, “You know, you make it all about the cross and the sacrifice and that one moment. When really that wasn’t what Jesus spent most of his time doing, you know? He went around talking to people and showing them how to be good people. It doesn’t always have to be about the bloody cross. Jesus was just a teacher, you know?”

Now as unusual as this conversation might seem in the context of running errands in Center City, this man’s argument is certainly not an unusual one. From the Jesus seminar, to agnostics, to Christians who are critical of “The Church,” people of all types and persuasions have argued for years that the Church’s focus on the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion has obscured the “truth” about who Jesus was and what Jesus was up to. Jesus was just a teacher, you know? He was a regular man, a great faith healer, a political upstart, who taught people how to love, how to live a moral life, how to choose an ethic that supports the poor and welcomes the outcast. You don’t need all of that hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, they argue. You don’t need sacraments and sacrifice, you don’t need mystery and miracle, and you certainly don’t need crucifixes to show you how to be a follower of this man Jesus. You just need to be a good student of his words. He was just a teacher, you know?

Now Jesus certainly was a teacher. He spent a huge amount of his time teaching, and he took his teaching technique seriously. He taught in parables, he harnessed the power of rhetoric. He liked a good old-fashioned lecture but was also a big fan of experiential learning. Jesus was a teacher, and an excellent one at that. Let’s look at today’s Gospel as an example. Now any good teacher will tell you that before entering the classroom, you need to have prepared a very detailed, very comprehensive lesson plan, with goals, objectives, procedures, and a means of evaluation. As one educational website says, you have to know where the students are going, how they will get there, and how you will know that they’ve made it. So here’s Jesus, heading to the villages of Caesarea Philippi with disciples in tow. It’s a bright, sunny day, with a high blue sky. Everyone is in a good mood. Peter and James and John are out in front of the group, still talking about the healing of the blind man they’d just seen in Bethsaida. Andrew and Phillip are practically skipping along, thrilled to be on the other side of the sea from the Pharisees. Judas is walking alone, wondering aloud where he might get some more of that magically multiplying bread. It is as good a time as any, so Jesus pulls out his lesson plan and calls his class to order. After dealing with Bartholomew who whines oh, Son of Man, can’t we just stroll along and look at the sky for a little while?, Jesus begins to teach.

Today’s Lesson: Jesus the Messiah. Goals for the lesson: 1. to clarify the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ identity; 2. to increase the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ mission; and 3. to introduce the disciples to a deeper understanding of their own mission. Objective 1: The disciples will be able to identify Jesus as Messiah. 2. The disciples will be able to define the word “Messiah.” 3. The disciples will be able to describe what the role of the Messiah looks like in the world, highlighting the Messiah’s suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection. 4. The disciples will be able to describe their own response to this Messiah, including taking up their own cross, following him faithfully, and turning over their entire lives to their discipleship.  

Procedure. Step 1: Ask the disciples who people say that Jesus is. Step 2: After hearing these responses, then ask the disciples who they think Jesus is. Step 3: Once the disciples have correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, strongly redefine this word for them by outlining how the Messiah will suffer, die, and rise again. [Accommodation for learning disabled students: If Peter has trouble understanding this new definition, privately rearticulate this vision in a firm and unyielding manner.] Step 4: Once the disciples are able to articulate this new definition of Messiahship, gather in all of the students and give them their work, which is to take on this cross themselves, be willing to sacrifice their own selfish desires when they come into conflict with the will of God, and let go of their death grip on their own lives. Step 5: Continue along the journey, with the disciples beginning to work on the integration of this learning. Evaluation: Jesus the teacher will closely observe the disciples’ progress over the coming days and weeks by noting how they demonstrate love for God and one another. Final note: this lesson may be repeated as necessary, even up to three times total, in order for the learning to be fully assimilated.

This really is an excellent lesson plan. It has clear goals, clear procedures, and an understanding that the objectives will only be met when the disciples adopt this new cross-bearing, self-giving way of being. Jesus is clearly all about instruction here – Mark tells us that he began to “teach” the disciples about the true nature of his Messiahship – not warn them, not pass along to them, but teach them. And Jesus does, in fact, present this lesson again – three times in fact – each time instructing the disciples clearly about what will happen to him for their sakes.

Jesus is a teacher, a dedicated, passionate, efficacious teacher. But he is not “just” a teacher because he teaches, any more than the Bible is “just” a history book because it contains history. Because what is it that Jesus is teaching? It is the lesson of the cross. Jesus is teaching them this – the crucifix. Jesus is a teacher, yes, but he offers us more than simply lessons about how to be kind or how to make good decisions. Jesus is a teacher, and he is a good enough teacher to save his most serious and powerful instruction for the lesson that is most important for his disciples, for us, to learn – the lesson of the cross. Here, right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel, at the heart, at the crux of Mark’s proclamation, Jesus works up his most excellent lesson to teach us the central truth of his own ministry: that the Son of Man will experience the fullness of humanity – our suffering, our rejection, even our death – and will transform it all. The cross – this place of shame and suffering – is changed into a place of mercy and glory in the hands of a loving God. The cross changes everything. The cross is the root of our education, the core learning of the Gospel, the wisdom Christ wants to impart. In fact, the cross is the lesson, and the goal, and the teacher, and the evaluation all in one.

And the class, of course, is still in session. The lesson goes on. That great “if” still lingers in the air: “If any want to become my followers….” Is that, in fact, what you want – to be a follower of this Messiah? Is that what you want – to learn this lesson, to practice it again and again until it becomes etched into your heart and soul? Do you want to be a student of this Jesus, to “listen as though who are taught” and to set your mind on divine things instead of human ones, to bear this cross?   

Jesus is before you, waiting for your answer, longing to teach you. You know the lesson; you have seen it again and again. You see the lesson hanging all over this church. The cross is our vindication, and our vindication is nigh. Jesus is Messiah. Study that, you know?

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

16 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Ephphatha

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

The legend is told of a secret chamber located somewhere deep beneath Saint Mark’s: somewhere deeper than the tomb that holds the mortal remains of Fernanda Wanamaker, deeper than the tunnels the PATCO trains run through under Locust Street, deeper than the underground river that is said to flow beneath 16^th street.  The entrance to the secret chamber is buried now, somewhere underneath the dirt floor of the eastern end of the Undercroft, directly beneath the choir stalls or the altar.  It is a chamber that has a sort of magical property: you could bring things there that were stuck or locked or jammed in such a way that they would no longer open, and you could say a simple, one-word prayer, and they’d be open-able.  A box that was locked and the key had been lost, a watch whose mechanism had gotten jammed, a jar that couldn’t be opened, a briefcase with a lock whose combination had been forgotten.  These are the sorts of things that were carried gently through the secret narrow passage, down the dark stairs, to the dimly lit chamber, that is said to be bare, with only a single candle to be lit inside it.  The Victorians had a lot more little locks on things than we do, they used little boxes to hold all kinds of things, and mechanical objects were more prone to failure and harder to replace than ours, so this was a useful secret chamber back in the day.  But even more remarkable things were said to happen in the chamber.

It is said that once a star choirboy, whose voice was damaged from an illness of some sort, so that he could barely speak, let alone sing, was escorted down past the columns of the Undercroft, led to the narrow entrance, given the single candle to light, told the prayer he had to recite, and sent down the long passage, deep below the church, and when he came back his voice was restored, and he was given a solo to sing the following Sunday.  It is also told that a priest of the parish, who was spurned by a woman he’d hoped to marry, went down to the secret passage to utter the prayer, but that strangely his broken heart was never mended.

Maybe it was with the construction of the Lady Chapel in 1900 that the entrance to the secret chamber was mistakenly covered over.  Maybe with the turn of the century, and with industrial advances, there were fewer things that needed to be unlocked, or the things that needed to be fixed were all too big to fit through the passageway and carried into the secret chamber.  Maybe the whole story was just made up, and there never was a secret chamber where you could bring the locked, the stuck, the broken, the failed, and have them unlocked, un-tuck, repaired or restored.  But even in our modern age, when watches don’t have any moving parts, when we tend not to lock things up in little boxes, etc, it’s nice to think that there could be a place where a child who has lost his voice could be sent, and he would return with a song on his lips.

I suppose that in this city of study and science, surrounded as we are by medical schools, it became a matter of ridiculous superstition to carry a broken music box (for instance) into a secret chamber and recite a special prayer by the light of a single candle, let alone to send a sick or injured child into such a place and hope for some mysterious healing, some other-worldly repair.  Better to send your sick children to Penn or to Jefferson, or eventually to CHOP.  So, if the entrance to the secret chamber was covered up, it seemed to be no great loss, I suppose, by the turn of the century.  The name of the broken-hearted priest had been forgotten already.  And the choirboy whose voice was restored had grown up and moved away, his identity lost in the shadows of memory.

It is said, however, that the chamber is still there, somewhere deep beneath us, and that a single candlestick stands inside it, waiting to hold its single candle, whose flame will flicker when the prayer – which has never been a secret – is uttered, should anyone ever find the lost entrance and venture down into the secret chamber.  The prayer, as I said, is simple, and never was a secret, which is counter-intuitive, because it’s the sort of incantation that you’d think would be the most tightly guarded secret of the chamber.  But it is taken from the lines of the portion of Saint Mark’s Gospel we heard this morning, and the church has known it, pronounced it openly all around the world for centuries.  It is the oddly lovely word that Jesus spoke after he put his fingers into a deaf man’s ears, and touched his tongue, since his speech was deeply imperfect. 

You remember that Saint Mark tells us first Jesus looked up to heaven and sighed.  These details are not incidental; they reveal the work of a triune God as the Son looks up to God the Father, and animates the Spirit with his breath.  And then he speaks the ancient Aramaic word: Ephphatha.

It’s not surprising, really, that as the world readied itself for a new century – that would turn out to be a bloody, warring century of enormous change and upheaval – that the thought of a secret chamber where little things could be fixed or unlocked or opened seemed foolishly fanciful.  But I wonder if something more was lost when the entrance to the secret chamber beneath Saint Mark’s was covered up and lost.  I wonder if, as the world entered the 20^th century, it wasn’t just the secret chamber that was lost, but also the kind of faith that believed you could utter a simple prayer and it would be answered unambiguously. 

I suspect the priest with the broken heart was the first person to lose that faith – at least the first one whose story we can tell.  I suspect it seemed absurd to him as he carried his candle down the passageway and placed it in its candlestick, and he stood there in a small, damp chamber, and pronounced the funny word, “Ephphatha.”  I suspect he sighed, but that his sigh was different from the sigh that Jesus sighed when he first uttered that word.  I suspect the broken-hearted priest’s sigh was a sigh of resignation, hopelessness, and despair.  Jesus used his sigh as a pre-amble to the prayer.  But the sigh of the broken-hearted priest contained the answer to his own prayer – nothing.

By the time the entrance to the secret chamber was lost, many people throughout the whole church had learned to thus mis-translate the sigh, and had stopped uttering the prayer altogether.  And so the 20^th century became a century during which the church so often sighed her own self-fulfilling sighs, and nothing happened.

Very, very seldom these days, I come across something small that I would like to have fixed or unlocked or opened, and that I suspect I could have carried through the entrance to the passageway to the secret chamber beneath Saint Mark’s.  And I sometimes sigh to think that the entrance to the passageway is lost forever, and maybe the story never was true anyway.

But much more often I stand at the altar, or I sit in my place during Morning or Evening Prayer and I think about all the big things that are broken or locked or stuck shut.  I think about a child’s illness, or a parishioner’s surgery, or the person who is almost surely going to lose his job and will have a hard time finding another.  I think about my friends who have gone to war, I think about the kids at Saint James School and the violence that is a part of their lives in a neighborhood with the highest murder rate in the city.  I think about the people we feed at the soup kitchen every Saturday, and about the people I walk by on the street every day who are in need, but have no wherewithal to find ways to have their needs met.  I think about the folks we worked with in Honduras, who live with so little, and about families of children being treated at CHOP who sometimes find their way here just to light a single candle as a prayer.  I think about the people I know who are getting older and whose lives are diminishing as their hearts and their minds deteriorate.  And I think about the funerals I have done for souls too young to be resting yet in peace, if you ask me.  I think about all these things in my prayers, and more, and it seems to me that there is so much in the world that is broken or locked or stuck shut.  There is so much that needs fixing, so much that has been silenced, so much that has been repressed, so many voices that need to be found again, and so many hearts that have been broken.

And I wonder why the secret chamber is necessary anymore.  I wonder if there ever really was a secret to that chamber, since the prayer itself never was a secret, and since almost nothing is easier than sighing, and if you mis-translate a sigh, you can always just try it again.  I wonder if it matters that the secret chamber is now lost to us, and if maybe, the reason its entrance was covered up was because the work of fixing, unlocking, opening, had outgrown the confines of its little passageway.

I wonder if it isn’t the case that the work God once supposedly did in the bowels of a dark and secret chamber is now meant to be practiced out in the open, right here, where anyone who cares to can come, where candles flicker in every corner, and all you need to do is learn to say the ancient prayer; “Ephphatha.”

I wonder if what was lost wasn’t so much the secret chamber, as the recognition of how stopped-up we have become: how hard it is for us to hear in this noisy world, and how difficult it is to say anything meaningful or intelligible, how closed-off we are from our neighbors, how unavailable to those who we should be loving, how tiny and self-centered our lives have become.

And I find no reason to regret the loss of the secret chamber, or to start digging to see if I can find again its entrance.  Instead, I find the prayer on my lips, and the desire and need to practice saying it, “Ephphatah.”  Be opened.

And I realize that it’s not the secret chamber that has gone missing, it’s the faith that Jesus can unlock the things that need to be unlocked, that Jesus can open that which has been stopped up, that Jesus can give voice to words that have been stuck in our throats, that Jesus can help us hear things we were never able to hear before, that Jesus can fix the things that are broken in our lives, that Jesus can bring healing to the thousand hurts of our lives.

I want to learn to sigh.  I want to learn to sigh the way Jesus did – not out of boredom or frustration, but with the knowledge and confidence that every breath we take carries the strength and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

I want to look in a mirror and practice saying the word to the person I know who needs it most, “Ephphatha.”  Be opened.  I want to know how it feels, up here, out in the open – not in some dark, secret chamber – to say with confidence and faith, “Be opened!  Ephphatha!”

Because I want you to learn how to say it too.  I want you to sigh with me – to sigh with Jesus – and to feel the stirring of the Holy Spirit with his breath.  I want you to say the prayer for yourselves and for the world – for everything that is tightly shut, closed off, repressed, buried, and left for dead or ruined or broken: Ephphatha!  Be opened!  Because the power of Jesus to heal, the power of Jesus to unlock, the power of Jesus to open that which is now closed has not been lost, it is not buried in a lost chamber, or in the mists of ages past.

You only need to learn his prayer, and to believe, and to be patient, for he does not always work so fast as he did all those years ago when he could just stick his fingers in your ears, and touch your tongue.  Nowadays, for reasons unknown, he is so often slower to do the work that once he would do in an instant.  But he looks down from heaven when we look up.  And still he sighs, when you and I sigh.  And still he prays, when you and I pray, “Ephphatha.  Be opened!”  And still he opens all that was closed in us before, and promises that there is still more that will be opened to us, here in this world, and in the world to come.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

9 September 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Chair is Full

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

So unless you have been on Mars for the last week, or, perhaps, spent your entire week looking at the photographs from Mars (which are very, very cool), you know that this past week was the Republican National Convention. I didn’t watch any of it. This had nothing to do with a lack of interest in politics, or Republicans, or Tampa, and everything to do with the fact that I was away on retreat in a group house in Cape May where the only other guests were children from the Youth Chorale of Trinity Wall Street who, as you might imagine, had other ideas about what to watch on the house’s one television. So on Friday morning, when I checked my news feed on Facebook and saw that multiple friends had posted something about Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair, I was perplexed. I was also a little concerned that Clint had gone off his rocker – but most of all I was curious. So I went online, googled “Clint Eastwood empty chair” and easily found his speech.

In case you missed the excitement, Clint Eastwood did, in fact, spend a chunk of his allotted time in front of the GOP faithful talking to an empty chair. But rest assured he has not gone off his rocker. No, Clint was pretending that President Obama was sitting in the empty chair. He asked the President questions. He pretended that the President answered him. Mostly he played to the crowd, making jokes at the President’s expense with the kind of biting sarcasm and mockery that Americans of both parties have somehow decided is appropriate for our nation’s political discourse. The empty chair was actually the perfect convention speech tool – it allowed Mr. Eastwood to be in complete control of the conversation, to ask questions and hear only the answers he wanted, to set up the laughs he wanted, to stir up the applause he wanted, to get in all of the digs he wanted. Talking to an empty chair was a strangely effective stunt. It wasn’t a real conversation, and it might have made him look a little foolish, but it accomplished his purpose, and that’s really all that matters.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what a lot of the world thinks we Christians are doing a lot of the time. They think that we gather here today on this first day of the week to gather around an empty throne and talk to an empty chair. Critics like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have written volumes trying to prove that there is no God, that religion is a massive social delusion, that the chair is demonstrably empty. The young unchurched in this country smartly ask why, if there actually is Someone, capital “S,” in the chair, we religious folks who are asking the questions all end up with such wildly different and aggressively competing answers. The outcast, particularly those who have been cast out, judged, and abused by the Church, look at the chair and hope that it’s empty, because they don’t want to even imagine that the Someone in the chair might reject them because they’re gay, or because they use birth control, or because they aren’t an American citizen, or because they smell, or have AIDS, or have doubts. The world looks at us at worship or prayer and sees us talking to an empty chair, imagines us carrying on a conversation all alone, asking and answering our own questions to make ourselves feel better, or to show how holy we are, or to try to help our neighbors be more lovable by remaking them in our own image. This isn’t a real conversation, they say – it makes you look foolish, and it might accomplish your purposes, but that actually doesn’t at all matter to us.  

What’s worse is that sometimes we in the Church act like we’re talking to an empty chair ourselves. Church leaders look with woe at parishes that are dying if not dead, count and recount our shrinking national Average Sunday attendance figures and our parish and diocesan budgets, and then imagine that the chair must be empty, at least temporarily. We in the Church sometimes look at the throne of God and see nothing but an empty seat. We have a hard time imagining a conversation where God might be able to do something new, and so we start talking to ourselves – which churches to close, which positions to eliminate, which liturgies to cut or shorten or “update” and “make relevant.” We start responding to our own questions with answers based in fear and an overwhelming sense of scarcity. And it isn’t just church leaders who do this. How often do you and I worry that we’re talking to an empty chair? We pray and forget to listen, we conjure up our own answers because we tire of listening for God’s, or, worse, we look at that empty chair and don’t bother to pray at all. No wonder the world looks in on us and wonders if we’ve gone off our rocker.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. The Israelites who followed Moses into the wilderness had gone off their rocker fairly regularly in their forty years of wandering. They moaned and complained for most of the journey, mostly moaning and complaining that their God had left them alone. When Moses went up the mountain, they looked around their campsite and saw only a big empty chair, so they happily set about filling it with a golden calf. They doubted and feared and rejected God; they imagined that no one was around to listen to them, and so they got to work answering their own questions in God’s absence.

But now, now, Moses says to them, you are here. You are standing on the edge of promise, looking into the land that flows with milk and honey, the land that God has always said he would give to you and to your children. And now that you are here, you are to keep God’s commandments and teach them to your children and to your children’s children. And why is this so important? Because keeping the commandments of God helps you to remember that God is near. God has given you all of these commandments not only because they will help you to live well in this holy land, but because they will remind you of God’s closeness every minute of every day, so that every time you say thank you, or bless this, or help me, you will be mindful of God right beside you. The commandments are given not as rules to follow in God’s absence, but as triggers to remind you of God’s presence. And when you live them out, you will be so steeped in God’s presence that when others see you, they will say, “What a fabulous bunch of people! I want to be just like them!” And they will say this because when they see you, they will see that there is, in fact, Someone sitting in the chair.

What a gift to give to this broken world. What a wonderful, timely, desperately necessary gift. To offer the world, by our own following of the commandments and by our own remembering of who gave them to us, a daily reminder that God is near. Isn’t that, ultimately, what the world most needs to remember? Don’t we want to help the world, and the Church, to see that the chair is full, that God sits on his holy throne, that the hem of his garment fills the temple? Isn’t that what we are sent to bear witness to – not that we’re Christians and we have it all together, or we’re Christians and we can tell you exactly how to live your life, or we’re Christians and so watch us be extra holy, but we’re Christians and our God is near. Our God reigns. When we pray, we pray to a God who is and who ever shall be. When we ask questions, God answers – maybe not when or how we imagine, but God is a God who responds. We speak and sing and cry and shout and moan and weep to a God who is very, very close to us, so close it’s like he’s sitting in the chair right next to you, so close it’s like he is sitting in your own heart.

And so here we stand, looking out over a new land, at the new program year at Saint Mark’s, at the new school year, at a new political year. So, now, you people, give heed to the great commandments that God has provided for you. Be doers of the word, care for the widows and orphans, love one another as Christ has loved you. Keep these commandments always and teach them to your children. Keep these commandments so that you will remember who you are and whose you are. Live in this holy way, so that when the world looks at you, they will see the truth that God is very near, that God reigns, that the chair is full.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

2 September 2012

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

The Baker's Yeast

A baker, as any half-witted dolt knows,

adds yeast to his dough, and waits as it grows.

For yeast is alive - it’s a single-celled critter -

warm water awakes it; gets the yeast all a-twitter.

It feasts on the sugars that are there in the flour;

and having thus eaten, discovers new power,

that’s impressive and all, but not very classy:

for the dough starts to rise when the yeast gets all gassy.

It’s what happens when yeast in the dough can ferment;

and results in light airy loaves, not cement.

Now there once was a baker, back in long-ago times:

a good decent man, who’d committed no crimes.

He baked tasty bread: it was light, it was crusty.

His ingredients were good, and his oven was trusty.

He also baked cookies and cupcakes and pies,

which required him early each morning to rise.

The first thing he did every morning was throw

salt, flour, and water, and yeast into dough.

Then using his very own hands he would knead

the dough, prompting yeast on the flour to feed.

His customers knew that his bread was first rate,

he sold out of it early, they knew not to be late.

They loved to awaken with its scent in the air,

and to hear the good baker lift his voice up in prayer,

for the baker was known as a man who loved God.

There were many who thought it was not at all odd

that his bread was the best you could locate for miles,

since the baker enjoyed from his God many smiles.

It made sense that such good bread, all crusty and yeasty,

was baked by a man many thought of as priest-y.

He was known to be good to the poor and the needy,

when a helper was needed, he would always be speedy

to offer whatever could make a wrong right,

or to find a solution, whatever the plight.

He was gen’rous and regularly gave away money,

and his humor, some said, turned a cloudy day sunny.

He was kind to the elders, cared for cats and for dogs,

and to keep himself fit, he went daily for jogs.

The body’s the temple of the spirit, he knew,

and he thanked the Almighty for every breath that he drew.

Early one morning, long before dawn,

He finished his mixing, his kneading, so on,

And he turned to his prayers while the yeast did its thing,

he gave thanks to the Lord for the blessings he’d bring

to the day that as yet had not hardly begun,

as he did every day till th’ dough’s rising was done.

Then he turned to the dough, and removed the damp towel

that covered it, and he looked down with a scowl.

For the dough had not risen, it was flaccid and flat,

where it should have plumped up like the crown of a hat.

But there was the dough, just as flat as a griddle,

which posed to the baker what you might call a riddle.

This was odd, this was strange, this was certainly weird,

and it could be an omen of the sort to be feared.

Why’d the dough not arisen?  Why’d the yeast not awoken?

Was the magic that once worked in the bakery now broken?

It’s mystical how the dough rises for bread;

it gives life to ingredients that look like they’re dead.

But they’re not, as you see when the dough gets puffed up,

and is baked into bread on which you and I sup.

And the baker, you see, had always regarded

rising dough as a sign that God had bombarded

the world with his blessings, and his people with grace,

and felt almost holy, he felt God’s embrace,

as the yeast did its work on the water and flour

by the baker in his bakery, of a wee morning hour.

It was almost as though it was meant as a sign

that although it was dark, the sun would still shine,

although there were troubles all over the earth,

there was still such a thing that you might call new birth.

The clock was still ticking, for time marches on,

but still the new dough was as flat as a lawn.

There would be no fresh bread from the oven that day;

he put a sign in the window and he started to pray.

He checked his supplies, and the temp in the room,

and he prayed that tomorrow the yeast, it would bloom.

He spent the day quietly and he slept well that night,

and he woke in the morning without too much fright;

and he mixed up his dough in its great big dough bowl,

but when the time came it was flat as a Sole.

This pattern continued for days and for days,

the yeast was not working throughout this whole phase;

the dough should have risen, and taken new shape,

but instead, day by day, it was flat as a crepe.

The baker of course began to despair,

and thought it must be something wrong in the air.

But he never stopped praying to his God and his Lord,

though he felt that his spirit once higher had soared.

He began baking quick breads, and muffins and matzoh,

but he couldn’t quite bring himself to start making pasta.

His neighbors and customers all now assumed

that the baker, for reasons unknown, must be doomed.

Weeks had gone by since he’d baked any bread;

he was pushing his chocolate chip cookies instead;

which were good, but it really just wasn’t the same;

they were not, you recall, what gave the baker his fame.

And people would sigh, as they passed by his place,

and remembered the bread, back before the disgrace

of this failure, that no one could quite understand,

least of all not the baker, who this shame must withstand.

For it seemed that the God he had every day prayed to

had somehow, despite all those prayers, not been swayed to

shower his blessings upon the good baker,

as if God now supposed that the man was a faker:

that his faith was not real, and his prayers were cheap,

and that people should see he was really a creep.

But the truth of the matter was not all that easy,

although his flat dough still left him quite queasy;

every morning although his dough would not rise,

the baker still sang out his pray’rs to the skies.

Then one day came a rumor about a new preacher:

a worker of wonders, and quite a good teacher,

who was said to be talking a lot about bread,

how he was the Bread of the living, not the dead.

He said that his Body was Bread, his Blood wine –

which is quite a hard teaching, not that tough to malign.

“I am the Bread of Life,” said this guy,

which as a lesson for some, might be hard to apply,

unless you’re a baker whose dough will not rise,

who’s been praying for grace to pour down from the skies.

In which case, a miracle-worker who speaks

about bread and new life, and who hangs out with freaks,

seems like a promising person to find;

like maybe he’d help a guy out of a bind:

like the baker’s, who frankly was now feeling cursed,

like his faith was akin to an un-quenchéd thirst.

So the baker set out to find this new teacher,

determined to discover if baking bread was a feature

of this man who so easily riled the High Priest,

but maybe knew something unique about yeast.

The baker, despite all reports of demise,

continued to pray for dough that would rise.

Every day in his bakery, he’d mix and he’d knead,

and he’d pray for what now’d be a miracle indeed.

Every day in his bakery, there’d be somewhere that dough,

that the baker was praying and praying would grow.

It was there on the day he went to find the great man,

it was there as if it was part of a plan,

to invite Jesus in to sit by the fire,

and then show him the dough: flat as a tire.

The baker found Jesus, heard what he had to say,

on how to live better, how to follow the Way.

About bread, it is true, Jesus went on and on;

enough for a chapter in the Gospel of John.

In his presence the baker began to feel warmed,

as if something brand new in his soul had been formed.

It was like Jesus’ teaching was yeast, his soul flour;

and the yeast had awakened a kind of new power,

as though everything that he once knew about bread

was now being instilled in his own soul instead.

He begged Jesus to come with him that very day,

and to see the day’s dough, like a fallen soufflé.

For he felt he had learned a new lesson in life,

he felt that there might be an end to his strife.

And Jesus went with him as far as the store,

but he paused with the baker, outside of the door,

and he told him again, he said, “I am the Bread,

and he who consumes me will never be dead.”

He instructed the baker to always believe,

and promised a blessing that soon he’d receive.

The baker who’d thought bread alone was the way

to make a good living, as long as he’d pray,

was now looking diff’rently at the whole thing,

as though in his heart he had crowned Jesus king.

He entered his bakery and he sniffed at the air,

for an odor was lingering that hadn’t been there

for weeks; it was something like yeast, he felt sure;

he smelled it as soon as he walked in the door.

And to his amazement, his certain surprising,

was the dough in its bowl, and today it was rising.

Now, yeast may be simple, made of only one cell,

it may not know much but it knows one thing well:

it knows that when people assume that you’re dead,

there’s new life within you, there’s real hope instead.

It takes just a small bit of water for God

to do in your life what you may think is odd:

to take the ingredients of life, though they’re plain,

and awaken new power, new life to attain.

It’s as though with the water, the yeast is baptized,

and just like old Laz’rus, the dough starts to rise.

The baker, you see, had needed to know

what only the yeast, it would seem, could him show.

The yeast has this gift, that it always is giving,

of knowing the One who’s the Bread of the living.

So next time you’re shoving some bread in your face,

remember this story, and all of God’s grace.

Remember the flour, the yeast, and the dough,

and how it refused, every morning, to grow.

Remember the baker, remember his faith;

and remember these words, which the Lord Jesus saith:

“I am the Bread who’s come down from heaven;

I am your hope, and I am your leaven.

He who partakes of me will never die,

and on this assurance you can rely.

When life seems uncertain, your seas are all tossed,

you begin to suspect that all hope has been lost,

your dough will not rise, so to speak, it stays flat,

as flat as a pancake, a pizza, a mat,

Remember the baker, who thought he was through,

and remember my words, and believe they are true.”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 August 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

My Rooftop Telescope

Scientists tell us that using a powerful telescope array from the South Pole they have been able to detect, or see, the oldest light in the universe - about 14 billion years old.  Much as I want to explain to you how it is possible to see the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, I find I am unable to do it.  It is not my field.  I have looked up resources that purport to put the explanation in layman’s terms, and I would happily regurgitate those explanations to you.  But even they are beyond me.  Nevertheless, I find it entirely plausible that we have looked up at the sky and seen – insofar as we can see light that is not actually visible to our eyes – or at least recorded the presence of light that originated nearly 14 billion years ago.  And I delight to think that such is the rigor of the human intellectual endeavor and that such is the liveliness of human imagination that we could achieve such a thing.  Moses had to climb a mountain just to see the Promised Land toward which he had been journeying for forty years, and into which he would never step foot.  But we can glance up from our lap-tops and look backwards for 14 billion years, and take pictures of it.

I trust that it pleases God in some measure to allow us such a vantage point; that he is ready to allow us to view secrets that were long tucked away in secret corners of his attic, unavailable to the prying eyes of older generations.  God has left the keys for us to find, in order to unlock the doors of the ancient chambers of time and space, and allowed us to rummage through the boxes there, to piece together pictures of the Beginning – or at least as close as we can get to the Beginning – wherein he has always promised he could be found.  The scientists say we can now see up to just about 380,000 years away from the Beginning – which they seem to think is pretty close, though it still sounds far away to me.

I am told that Religion and Science are supposed to rumble about the Beginning: stark disagreement is supposed to define our posture toward one another.  But about at least one thing most of us agree: there is nothing for us to remember about the Beginning; none of us was there; it would be a matter of time before humans came on the scene.  So when we look back at the Beginning of time – or as close as we can get to it – we are seeing something, recording something, we have never seen before.  It did not shape our human experience, it is not a part of our corporate memory, there are no human shadows to be found dancing in the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

Back on earth, when the Rectory was built in 1893, it was the only building in the Saint Mark’s cluster of buildings on Locust Street that was built with a flat roof.  This piece of information seems incidental until you realize what easy access one has to the roof of the Rectory.  Using only the power of one’s imagination, you can carry up to the rooftop there a special kind of telescopic array that allows you to look up into the sky and see back in time.

This project I have undertaken on a lovely summer’s night – for it takes almost no time at all to build even the most sophisticated telescope from one’s imagination, and the materials are remarkably easy to carry up the stairs.  Such a telescope – the kind you build with your imagination – cannot reliably detect the light of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – not in a way suitable for publication in peer-reviewed journals, anyway.  But it can look back to almost any point in time, if you want it to.  And being a church telescope means that its lenses have been ground and shaped by a certain memory.  It’s more sensitive to light at certain places on the spectrum.  We see images more clearly with such a telescope that shaped our corporate memory, with identifiable human shadows, in the shape of figures we can name, dancing in the light of the stars.  And it is a beautiful thing to go up to the Rectory roof on a clear summer’s night and to stare through the imaginary telescope into the distant past of history and to listen.  For with this telescope you can hear, as well as see – it was easy enough to build it that way in my imagination: all the parts were free!

Not long ago, I was up there, looking and listening; turning the dials to see what I could pick up from the past.  And I heard this question from ages past: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  And I knew immediately who it was they were talking about, since I’d come across this conversation before in the scriptures.  And standing there on the rooftop, I realized how immediately the question translated to the present moment, how equally perplexing – maybe even more so – that question seems today as it did all those centuries ago, and how it might confuse people who pass by the church if they ever stop to wonder what it is we do in here.

How can this man give us his flesh to eat?  It seems a perfectly reasonable question.  Early Christians were looked at with significant suspicion, since they seemed to be talking like cannibals.  But they were not cannibals.  They were good Jewish boys and girls who mostly kept kosher in the earliest days.  Which made the question all the more poignant: How can this man give us his flesh to eat?  And do we need a whole new set of dishes for it?

How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

What they discovered was this: that Jesus was not inviting them to go at him with knives and forks.  Rather, he was opening up to them one of the secrets of God’s mysterious love.  He was allowing them to enter into a new chamber of God’s life, where they had never been before.  They discovered that it pleased God to allow them a new vantage point from which to see his work of salvation: reclining by his Son at a table, praying with him in a garden, walking with him toward the Cross, weeping with his mother at his death, and waiting for his resurrection.

“I am the living Bread,” Jesus said.  But they did not yet know what they were seeing, what they were hearing.  They had not yet seen all that we have seen.  Until he sat at table with them and broke the bread and blessed the cup; until he told them to wait with him while he prayed; until he challenged them to take up their own cross; until he hung and died on his Cross; until he rose from the grave, and made himself known to them in the breaking of the bread.  All these were pieces of a puzzle they put together, as God slowly widened the aperture of their vision, and let more light into the lens, and helped them see, and let them cast their own shadows, their own questions on the image that we can peer into from the telescope on the roof of the Rectory.

And what about us?  How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

Well, what’s the matter with you?  Do you really need a flat roof and a Rectory?  Can’t you do this with me now?  Can’t you focus with me the lens that’s hidden up in the steeple of this church and points toward God?  Can’t you find the knobs to turn in your mind’s eye, so you can see what’s detected there?  Can’t you adjust them to look back at his supper with disciples?  Can’t you hear him say, “This is my Body.  This is my Blood.  Take, eat.  Do this in remembrance of me”?

Do you believe that we are able to look back at the origins of the universe and see light that is 14 billion years old, but we can’t look back and remember what this means?  Do you believe God made our vision so dim, our imaginations so dull?  Do you think the light they are looking at from their telescopes is just a memory of light that is 14 billion years old, and not the real thing?  And do you think the words we hear when they echo to us from only two thousand years ago are really just a memory and not the real thing?  You don’t think he had another kind of remembrance in mind?  You don’t think he knew we’d be able to see 14 billion years into the past some day?

I love to go up to my rooftop observatory and look up into the present and see the past hurtling toward me, fast as light, and hear the ancient words, and know they are alive.  I love to lengthen to the focus of my telescopic array and look further back in time to the very Beginning, which I can do with the greatest of ease, listening for the clear sound of the beating of wings over water that was the only sound to be heard in the Beginning, and then a voice that seems to be saying, “I will be who I will be.”

I am strengthened by the knowledge that there are real telescopes that can see almost as far as my telescope can see, telescopes that can see light that originated 14 billion years ago.

But I can see a light that is older still, a light that was there in the Beginning. 

And it takes only an adjustment of the lens to see that light take shape, as he is born of a human mother.  And then I can hear, from my rooftop, the man that that child became offer his Body and his Blood for me.

And when I wonder, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?  I have only to look up with they eyes of my heart, to see where past and present hurtle toward one another at the speed of light.  And I remember how it is that God gives us signs to help us see the work he does secretly and silently, so that we will know we have been fed.  And we don’t have to wonder how he can give us his flesh to eat: we have only to open our mouths, and believe.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 August 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Father Stuart Kenworthy - 5 August 2012

You may listen to Father Kenworthy's sermon here.

Preached by Father Stuart Kenworthy

5 August 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Built for Abundance

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

In the early 2000’s, researchers at Cornell University conducted an experiment about people’s eating habits. Participants were simply asked to eat a bowl of soup, and to stop eating when they felt full. Easy enough. The trick was that some of the bowls of soup were just bowls of soup, but some of the bowls were not. They were attached to a pump that continuously refilled the soup from the bottom without the eater being any the wiser. Picture the never-ending soup bowl lunch special at Olive Garden – just a lot sneakier. There was always soup in the bowl – the participants could eat and eat and eat, and the soup would never run out.  

And as you might have already guessed, the people sitting before the magical refilling soup bowls did just that – they ate, and ate, and ate. Across the board, the participants eating from the refilling bowls ate more than the other soup eaters, and they didn’t indicate that they felt stuffed or even that they noticed that they had eaten more than the bowl looked as if it would allow. They just ate and ate and ate. Who knows – they might have been content to continue eating into infinity if there had also been a magical refilling bread basket and a magical refilling glass of Chianti.

The question was…why? Why didn’t they notice how much they were eating? Why were they deceived by a ploy that, one would imagine, should have become evident about 15 or 20 spoonfuls in?     Well, apparently, contrary to what our mothers always told us, it’s actually hard for our eyes to be too big for our stomachs. If our eyes can be deceived into thinking we’re eating a “normal” sized meal, our stomachs will happily play along. We hear about this all the time in reports about the gradual growth in dinner plates and paper cups and portion sizes that has given us plates as big as manhole covers, 64 oz. gigantor gulps, and double supersized shovels-full-o’ French fries. And why are our stomachs so happy to oblige our big eyes? Well, according to some scientists, it’s because we are built for scarcity. Throughout history, generations of men and women have had to live on very, very little, and so when they were presented with a feast, their bodies basically told them, “Eat as much as you can, because you aren’t going to be seeing this much food again for a while.” And apparently, we are still programmed to do this. Even when most of us are able to eat three full meals a day, and when we live in a country with the highest obesity rate in history, we still imagine that we are built for scarcity. Our bodies live in fear that we won’t get enough food, and so we ignore our full stomachs and eat and eat and eat.

The world hears this and confidently nods its head. Yes, of course, that’s right; we are built for scarcity; we are bottomless pits of need. We have so many needs that a thoughtful man named Mazlow put them in a nice hierarchy for us so that we might know exactly what our needs are at any given time. If the world is our shepherd, it will tell us that we lack everything. There isn’t enough food to go around – not enough food for the poor in this city, for the families of famine in east Africa, or for the one hundred people around the world who have died from starvation since I began this sermon. There is drought, there is disorder and red tape and politics, and there just isn’t enough food to go around.

And it isn’t just food that we lack, the world whispers. We also lack money and love, meaning and connections. We lack safety and freedom and time. The need goes on and on. And when we start listening to that whispering, we can’t help but go a little crazy. We start slurping up anything and everything we can find while our brains tells us, “Grab this – it might help somehow someday.” We gorge ourselves on any soup we can find: food, power, information, guns, sex. We eat more calories than we can ever use in a day, we gobble up status updates and tweets like they’re real sustenance; we consume people and friendships, we guzzle gas and disposable plastics and Botox and firearms. We eat and eat and eat, all the while hearing the whispers: you are built for scarcity.

But this is a lie. For you and I are not built for scarcity, we are built for abundance. We are created, crafted and knit together, by a loving God who has made us to expect abundance. We are made first in God’s image, not just in the image of our hunt and gather ancestors. We are God’s children, and God gives us every good gift. God gives us the breath in our lungs, the voltage in our cells, the inspiration of our minds and the compassion of our hearts. This is not to say that there is not real need in the world or in our lives – but this need is an aberration, not the rule. The rule is that we are filled, all of us, with all of the fullness of God. And if we really listen to our hearts, we know that to be true. At our core, below the worry and fear, deep in our center where the truth speaks to us in the voice of the Holy Spirit, we know that God will give us our food in due season and satisfy the needs of every living creature.

Deep in our very beings, we know this, and yet we forget this again and again and again. We, like the disciples, look out at the hordes of people covered in need and we panic. Oh no, we think, there are people out there wasting away with need, people with no food, no job, no livelihood, no love, no family, no purpose, no security, no time. And we stand staring at them – or sometimes at ourselves in the mirror – and we feel paralyzed. But then, Jesus arrives. And “when he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’” He says this, John tells us, to test Philip, to see if Philip could remember in the face of the crowds what he – and they – were built for. He says this maybe with a little wink, knowing what he would do, hopeful that the disciples would know that too. But when they don’t, when instead they start talking about six months’ wages and the cheapest bread seller and where was the closest coinstar machine and did anyone have a living social discount, Jesus realizes that his guys will – again – need his help. And so when that famous second-born son, Andrew, shows Jesus the only food he’s been able to find – five barley loaves as dense and heavy as hockey pucks and two shriveled up dried fish – Jesus smiles. He tells the disciples to please show the people to their seats on the grass, gives God thanks for the food they are about to receive, and feeds the people. From a miraculous refilling bread basket. And the people eat and eat and eat, the very food of heaven, the bread of life, the abundance of grace. And then the disciples remember what they’re truly built for.

So it’s okay if we find ourselves swimming in a sense of lack, panicking because the waves of need seem to be ready to swamp our boat. It’s okay; we’re in good company. Like the disciples, we just need to be reminded that there is a way out of the storm; there is a way to silence the howling winds of the world. There is, in fact, only one way, and it’s the way the disciples learned and practiced over and over again. We look to Christ. We look out at the world and look to keep Christ at the center, Christ as the lodestone, so that no matter where our eyes may fall, no matter what the world might show us, no matter what fears and needs and lack we see, we first see Christ standing before us saying I AM. Fear not, I AM. I AM the bread of life. I AM the water of salvation. I AM the good shepherd, and therefore you shall lack nothing.

And the true miracle of this is that when we start living this way, the world changes. When we begin to live in the awareness of God’s abundance, when we claim ourselves as creatures built for that abundance, we begin to change the world in Christ’s name. In our food cupboard, we open our doors to the poor so that they can get their own bread and fishes and cereal and milk. On Saturday mornings, we offer our own miraculous bowls of refilling soup, with baskets of leftover bread that gets made into bread pudding. In our Vacation Music School, we give out the gift of music in this place to all of the children of the neighborhood. We offer a voice to the voiceless, comfort to those who mourn, connection and fellowship to the lonely. And in our worship, we invite people to come to this place to sit at table and be fed, again and again, day after day, week after week, to eat and eat and eat. And Christ standing before us, in this worship and in our ministry and mission, helps us to remember, helps us to listen to that voice deep in our guts, to his voice telling us what we are truly built for. And so sit down here and eat. And then put down your spoon and feed someone else. And together we will all eat and be most satisfied.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

29 July 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia