Take It to Mary

According to custom, Jesus would have been 40 days old, not even 6 weeks, when Mary and Joseph came with him to the Temple. I think it’s fair to say that Mary has seen some things, at this point. A miraculous pregnancy, an arduous journey on foot, or perhaps a donkey, to Bethlehem. Giving birth in a stable, angels and shepherds interrupting the whole process to sing their praises to the child, and probably a very bewildered and grumpy postnatal Mary. A brief recovery period, still likely living amongst strangers in who knows what accommodations, and finally it is time to present Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem. The Holy Family has come to fulfill their duty, sleep deprived, no doubt, bringing along with them the two turtledoves. Still bewildered and sleep deprived, they encounter the aged Simeon who initially grants them with a beautiful prayer that we still say daily at Evening Prayer, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…”, and he blesses the family. 

I bet Mary and Joseph think they’re done now. As wonderful and beautiful the experience has been, I bet they are ready to go make their home together and finally settle into life, even if they suspect that life will be eventful, raising the holy child of God together. But Simeon is not done with Mary yet. At first, what he says is no news to Mary. “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel.” She had been told as much by the Angel Gabriel. To answer the question of the popular Christmas song, Mary did you know? Mary knew. But then, Simeon throws in at the end of his spiel, almost as an afterthought it seems, one of the most poignant lines in all of Scripture in my opinion. “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” Just heart-breaking. But also, as just about any mother or parent out there can tell you, painfully true.

Now, on this point, I do wonder if she knew. I don’t think most new parents understand the depth of the truth of these words. A sword pierces my soul every time one of my children is hurt, either physically or emotionally, and it hurts to love another human being that much. Which is why I find these words of Simeon so gut-wrenching, and Mary’s quiet acceptance of these words so poignant. Mary’s soul, like all the mothers before and after her who have had to watch their children suffer, would indeed be pierced. As terrible as it may sound, I also believe that this is one of the gifts of parenthood. Having your soul pierced, I mean. It’s not strictly limited to parents, so if you are not a parent, fear not – your soul can still be pierced if you’ll allow it to be. It’s just easy for me to see the truth of Simeon’s words through the eyes of a mother.

There is nothing as tender as holding a 5 week old baby as they sleep. I honestly don’t think it matters if this is your own child or not. It’s even more poignant when it’s not. Just hold a sleeping newborn sometime if their parent will allow it, much like Simeon did. Feel their little fingers grasping yours, their soft breaths as they fall into a deep milk-drunken slumber to dream their infant dreams. The trust and love that you have been given freely by that child, that you have done absolutely nothing to earn, pierces you and makes you understand that God’s grace is truly freely bestowed on all people, regardless of our merits. It also pierces my soul to know that God’s love for me is exactly the same. Abundant, beautiful, and totally unconditional.

And we need those moments of the piercing realization of God’s love to get us through the moments when our souls are pierced not by love, but by sorrow. The sorrow at the loss of a child or a loved one, especially for the mothers like Mary who have seen their own children murdered at the hands of the state. Sorrow when we see children starving because of the harrowing deprivations of war. Sorrow in times of serious illness, when it is easy to fall into despair. Moments that cut us through to our very souls. Yet it is also out of those cut to the heart moments of abject grief and hurt that I often recognize how closely God abides with me always. How God transforms these moments into something holy by entering in through the hole in my heart.

My spiritual director once passed on some advice to me that was given to her by late Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold. Whenever her sorrow became too great, often for the sake of one of her children, or for some other reason, Bishop Griswold would say, “Take it to Mary. She knows.” And it’s so true, isn’t it? Whatever sword is piercing your own hearts, whether it’s tonight, or some future time, you might try taking it to Mary. Mary knows that not even a sword through the heart can separate us from the love of God. She knows that sometimes you have to allow your soul to be pierced, even when it is painful, in order for God’s love to truly enter in. And she knows that her son is always near those who need him most. 

And so beloved, I ask you to allow your souls to be pierced by Simeon’s words, too, so that the light of Christ can also enter in. Tonight, on the night when we blessed the candles to be used throughout our church year, remember that those lights will keep shining through the darkest of moments. Whether you come to church rejoicing or mourning, they will keep shining brightly to remind us all that the light of Christ, seen so brightly by those at the Temple during his Presentation, is with us through moments of joy and moments when our own souls feel as though a sword has been thrust through them. May we feel the nearness of his love throughout the year. And if all else fails, take it to Mary. She knows.

The Fear Of The Lord

On any given week in church we face the question of whether or not it does anybody any good for us to be here.  You might not have asked that question, but a lot of other people have.  And the question of whether or not it does anybody any good to be here might hinge on whether or not the scriptures have anything useful to say to us.  And that question might hinge on whether or not the Gospel or any other reading assigned on a given day had anything to do with “unclean spirits.”  And I would contend that the “unclean spirits” question (which is inextricably linked to the “demons” question) would tend, for most modern audiences to militate against the possibility that there is a message of tremendous usefulness at hand, and therefore also to chafe against the possibility that coming to church on a day like today will do you any good.

You could also, I suggest, hear St. Paul’s exhortation against eating food offered to idols without feeling your heart strangely warmed.  And whatever is going on with Moses in Deuteronomy today is probably not the type of thing you want to set to music and sing about.

As a matter of last resort you might turn to the Psalms.  And in Psalm 111 you would encounter a well-worn biblical phrase that could also leave you shaking your head: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  These words sound ill-suited to the kind of warm and fuzzy, God-loves-you-as-you-are, don’t-be-ashamed-of-yourself religion that I am often happy to promote here.  Should we really be whipping up fear in church?  Even the fear of God?

The fear of God, of course, used to be something that you might need to have put into you if you were insufficiently enthralled by the authority, interests, direction, etc of someone who had power over you.  The phrase, I am told, had currency in the 19th century goals of colonialism, which sought to put the fear of God into colonized peoples who had not yet experienced it.  Lucky them.

So, is the fear of the Lord something to be thought well of?  Can any good come from the fear of the Lord?  Is wisdom really to be found where the Lord is feared?  At times like these, I like to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary to see if I’m missing anything.

Fear, as a noun: “a sudden and terrible event.”

“The emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some evil.”

“A state of alarm or dread.”

“Ground or reason for alarm.”

Eventually we get to this: “A mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.”  That’s something I can work with!

As a verb, it’s pretty much the same scenario as the noun “fear:”

“To inspire with fear.”

“To drive away by fear, frighten away, scare.”

“To deter from a course of conduct.”

“To feel alarmed, uneasy, lest something should happen.”

“To regard with fear, be afraid of a person or thing as a cause of danger.”

And, eventually, pretty deep into it, “to regard with reverence and awe; to revere.”

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  Frankly, it’s difficult for us to make any sense of this sentiment since it rests on two things that are in short supply these days: the fear of the Lord and wisdom.

Try now, (with this thought in our heads that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom) to glean some insight from the unsettling encounter, in St. Mark’s Gospel, of this man with the unclean spirit, who nevertheless knows who Jesus is, and, in fact, seems to know quite a bit about him.  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” he says.  “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

I know who you are, the Holy One of God.

It’s a curious thing about this unclean spirit: we are not told what harm the spirit has done to the man it possesses.  Here is just a guy who stands up in the synagogue and challenges Jesus.  The spirit had not thrown the man into fires, or caused him to convulse (yet), or necessitated chains to restrain him.  If there’s a history of this unclean spirit, we don’t know what it is.  But there is something we can deduce about this unclean spirit.  Although the spirit has enough insight to know who Jesus is, the spirit lacks something very important.  The unclean spirit seems to be entirely without any fear of the Lord.  That is to say that the unclean spirit cannot sense that a sudden and terrible event is about to take place in its existence.  The unclean spirit in no way feels alarmed, uneasy, lest something should happen.  The unclean spirit senses no emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger to itself, even though the spirit is about to be cast out of its host, of whom, I presume the unclean spirit is in need.  And the unclean spirit, despite its privileged knowledge of whose presence it is in which it finds itself, is aware of no mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.

The unclean spirit knows exactly who it’s dealing with, and yet the unclean spirit has no fear of the Lord, no fear of God.  We know this, because there is no evidence of that mingled feeling of either dread or reverence toward Jesus.  The unclean spirit, who stands right before Jesus, and tells him, that he knows who he is: the Holy One of God, feels no need to regard Jesus with reverence and awe; sees no reason at all to revere Jesus.

“Have you come to destroy us?” the unclean spirit asks, speaking, I guess, on behalf of either more than one unclean spirit that may possess the man, or at least on behalf of some larger population of unclean spirits.  Have you come to destroy us?  Again, the only thing we know about this unclean spirit is that although it knows who Jesus is, and presumably also knows what kind of power Jesus possesses (the power to destroy unclean spirits), it stands there with little or no fear of the Lord.  All it had to do was keep its mouth shut.  Have you come to destroy us?

Fearless, the unclean spirit is no match for Jesus, and now, now that Jesus orders the spirit to “Be silent and come out of him,” now, the spirit convulses and screams out in its last-bid effort to control the man, and to prolong its presence in the world of the flesh.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

I never know what to make of unclean spirits.  But I know we live in a society that is largely without any fear of the Lord, by which I mean that we live in a society that, by and large, is possessed of no mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.

It’s important, I think, to remind ourselves, that the fear of the Lord, is quite a distinct topic of conversation from the wrath of God.  I think that the two may be connected in many people’s minds, and that the one is thought to be the product of the other: the fear of the Lord might be the reasonable response to the wrath of God.

I, myself, am completely unfamiliar with the wrath of God, except as something I have read about.  But I do know what it is to regard God with reverence and awe; to revere the Lord Jesus, and I am quite sure my life is the better off for it.  And because I know myself to be a sinner - which is to say that I know myself to be someone who has often chosen what I want over what I suspect God might want for myself - because I know myself to be a sinner, like all human beings.  And because I believe that God is the elemental force in the world and the most important force in my life, I am not unfamiliar with what you might call a mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.

I know myself to be far from God’s dearest desire for me every time I hold on to money for myself that I might have given away, or every time I shrug my shoulders in helplessness as I pass a homeless person lying on the street, or every time I eat a Costco rotisserie chicken with zero care for the circumstances that made that chicken so cheap.  As if the consequences of my decisions, as someone to whom much has been given, make no difference to anyone else.  But they do.  And I cannot blame these decisions on an unclean spirit, can I?  The chicken, and the homeless person, and my own chronic selfishness are not unrelated to the fear of the Lord.  Because solutions exist for all these matters - from the homeless person to the Costco chicken, and for me, too - but such solutions would have to be born of a wisdom that desires to find them.

Absent any mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God, we may never be motivated to seek the wisdom that will inform the decisions that bedevil us, and which have consequences far beyond the fate of a Costco chicken.  The more I consider the fear of the Lord, the more I find that I rather approve of the possibility of it, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought I could.  It’s not because I think that God should more frequently inspire us with fear, or because I think God should provide a constant ground or reason for alarm in our lives.

It’s because that mingled feeling of dread and reverence has some motivational heft that might actually get us somewhere, when we contemplate the consequences of our own actions, and the awesome power of God in the same breath, and we think that it’s possible that wisdom could actually get us somewhere, if we’d just seek it out.

On any given week in church we face the question of whether or not it does anybody any good for us to be here.  You might not have asked that question, but a lot of other people have.  I am not here to put the fear of God into you - I’m afraid that’s not my specialty.  I’m much too inclined toward the warm and fuzzy, God-loves-you-as-you-are, don’t-be-ashamed-of-yourself type of religion to be very good at instilling the fear of God in anyone.

But I do think we might discover together (if we think and pray about our lives and about what God is doing in us and in the world) a mingled feeling of dread and reverence toward God.  And those mingled feelings might lead us to regard the Lord Jesus with reverence and awe; to revere him, and his teaching, and his life, and his pure and pristine Spirit in the world today.  Learning to discern the power of and presence and grace of God in the world, might lead us into a deeper wisdom than that we are possessed of today.  And if you ask me, the world is in deep and desperate need of wisdom.  If we want to find it, we could do much worse than to begin with the fear of the Lord.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
28 January 2024
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

The Call of God

It feels very appropriate that today on the first Sunday of a new call for me here at Saint Mark’s that I have the privilege of exploring these multiple call stories we heard in today’s Scripture. If we’re looking to draw immediate insights into what it means to be a person called by God, as we all are in one way or another, we may be disappointed. After all, there’s not much in common between these stories on the surface, and the endings of these call stories can seem a little depressing.  

We begin with Jonah and his call to preach to the Ninevites a message of repentance. Now of course, Jonah’s most famous call story is from his initial refusal to heed God’s call. In the first chapter of this short book, God tells Jonah, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah instead attempts to escape God’s call, landing himself at the bottom of the sea inside of the belly of a large fish. It’s only after three days and three nights in this fish that Jonah finally decides to pray for deliverance. Three days before he would ask for help! Yet God listens to Jonah and delivers him, and immediately reiterates the call to go preach to the Ninevites, which is where our reading picks up today. 

So we find Jonah, freshly spewn from the belly of a fish, going to do what God has called upon him to do. He reaches Nineveh, the stronghold of the longtime enemies of the Israelites. The Ninevites, part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, were the violent bullies of the ancient Mesopotamian world - stopping at nothing to expand their empire. It was considered to be a place of great wickedness, of cruelty and violence, of pagan gods - everything the God of Israel was supposed to stand against.

So no, Jonah doesn’t want to be there. He was, after all, willing to sit in a fish’s belly for three days rather than going there to those people. You might think of it as the equivalent of asking a Ukrainian citizen to go to Moscow to preach a message of repentance to Vladimir Putin. Jonah didn’t want to do that, and not only did he not want the job, he didn’t even think those people deserved to hear God’s word. I’m not sure who those people would be for you, but we all have them. People you avoid like the plague. People you feel are responsible for many of our societal ills – noxious governmental figures and the people who support them. I know I do. Whoever it is for you, it’s human nature to have people to whom you would rather not associate with, much less preach to. After all, if they listened, that might mean we’d have to associate with them. To learn to love them as God’s children. Even if they repented and changed their ways, we probably wouldn’t be satisfied. We’d say it was a show to curry favor. That they must be up to something. 

You may remember that Jonah’s story ends in a similar, if depressing way. The Ninevites do, indeed, listen to Jonah. Everyone from the King down to even the animals of Nineveh put on sackcloth and ashes. The King decrees that everyone should stop their violent ways and pray earnestly to God. We have no reason to suppose that this was anything but sincere because God does change his mind and spares the Ninevites. 

We don’t hear the conclusion of the story today, but do you remember what Jonah does? He sulks. He sits down under a tree and waits to die because he is so angry at God for being compassionate. He tells God, “I knew you would do this to me. It’s why I tried to run away in the first place.” And we don’t get a happy ending for Jonah. Go read through the Book of Jonah again sometime - it’s very short. We never learn whether Jonah decides it’s better to go talk with the Ninevites who have repented, or whether he loses himself in isolation and self-pity in his refusal to accept God’s unbelievable compassion for Jonah’s enemies.

I once had a family friend who was horrified that I was associating with a person who considered themself to be an atheist. To her this was right up there with communists and anarchists. Fast forward several months to when this person had a change of heart and became open to hearing God’s word and attending church, all surely things which we could celebrate, and do you know what she said? “Well, if you can’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” This is true, y’all. And I don’t think this was a particularly negative woman. She was ordinarily quite kind, and I think most of the time she genuinely wanted to love God. But somehow, she had a little bit of the Jonah complex, and couldn’t let herself accept God’s goodness in this case.

Now if we take a look at our Gospel account, the disciples Jesus calls begin with a more hopeful response than that of Jonah. Jesus comes preaching a message of repentance and calls two sets of brothers who immediately stop what they are doing to follow Jesus. But we know how difficult it became for those men to maintain their willingness to immediately follow God’s call without question. Most of them abandon their Lord, deny him, and lock themselves away in fear after his crucifixion.

Yes, even when we try to follow God’s call like the disciples, we all have a bit of Jonah lurking inside us, don’t we? Restricting our willingness to go where we are truly called. Instilling fear of God’s limitless compassion for others because what if that means that we won’t be able to feel as good about ourselves any more? Infecting us with smugness and self-righteousness when we see sin in others that limits our abilities to live out our Christian vocations in the world.   

So, you might ask, where is the Good News in all of this? Are we doomed to be faithless, ineffective disciples no matter how hard we try? No, not at all! There are two main things that give me so much hope for the possibility of living out our Christian vocations in this world. 

The first is that we don’t hear the full story of the calling of people who decide to listen to God’s call in these passages. This is not to say that we have nothing to learn from these stories. But I believe that the real Biblical examples of vocation we are supposed to imitate are frequently not lifted up for our consideration. Take, for example, the twelve disciples. Now we know that more than twelve people were following Jesus at any given time. We hear about the twelve who are sent out with a specific purpose, and we are grateful to them for spreading the Good News in the ways they did, but they were not the only ones who were called to follow and serve Jesus. Much much later in this Gospel account, during the crucifixion of Jesus, we hear again about some of the people Jesus called in Galilee back in this first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. But it wasn’t Simon Peter or Andrew or James or John. No, Mark tells us that during the crucifixion of our Lord there were followers of Jesus who stayed with him since his first days preaching in Galilee. They were the women who were watching from a distance. Mark says, “in Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs. Many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem were also there.”

From these examples of women disciples, we see that it’s not inevitable that our call stories end in failure to follow through, or an unwillingness to go where God calls us. It’s that these types of disciples don’t always make the news. They are not in positions of power or authority, or trying to walk on water. They are tending to the needs of Jesus wherever they find him in the world, and they don’t have time for dramatic arguments with God, or flashy scenes where they try to demonstrate their faith so that other people will notice how faithful they are. They are simply doing the work that has been given to them to do. So I take great hope in the untold stories of disciples like these, knowing that they are out there fulfilling their vocations in classrooms, or shelters, or hospitals, or any of the countless places where Jesus goes to be with the most vulnerable in our society.

There’s also a second place to find hope in the stories of Jonah and the apostles. Jonah may have tried everything to escape God’s call. He may have been petty and grumpy, and willing to sit down and starve rather than rejoice in the repentance of his enemies. But you know what the result of all that was? An entire city repented of their wickedness. For that brief period of time, an entire city committed to doing what was right in God’s sight. An entire city of God’s creatures was spared from calamity and destruction. 

And yes, the disciples may have abandoned and denied Jesus, but still, the message of his resurrection was spread abroad. People were healed and saved, and we are here to continue their work. So I take great comfort and hope in the fact that even when we’re not faithful followers and we fall short of God’s plans for us, still God does amazing work through our worst efforts. That is really good news!

So take hope, friends. Whether you are in a season of fruitful, faithful discipleship like the women from Galilee, or whether you are a grumpy prophet, prone to sulking, God still calls you. And God will use you so that the “whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works” no matter what obstacles you try to throw in God’s way.