Saint Mark's Church

Last week was a bad week.

Back when the Twin Towers fell, I was glued to the TV - it was almost impossible not to be. When Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, I gave in to curiosity and watched - once - the disgusting on-line footage of the prelude to his execution. I could go no further.

All during this past week I have been aware that the Internet is full of images that portray both the melee of confusion at Virginia Tech this week as well as the so-called manifesto of the killer of 32 people. But I am unable to bring myself to watch either the footage from Blacksburg or the killer's homemade videos. It is too much for me, to tell you the truth. And I am not sure I am yet blasé enough to watch again the evidence of such evil cruelty, as though it were just another day of the evening news. There are times when the reality of dark forces in this world is just too plain to be ignored. And how will we ever make sense of the killings in Virginia this week?

It is, of course, the scale of the tragedy that makes it too hard to watch - as well as the odor of evil that must surely linger around all the yellow emergency tape strung up by the Police, and in the envelope that arrived at NBC containing the gunman's deranged testimony.

But even if I do not watch these images up close, I cannot escape the dark power of their awful consequences. And even if I never switched on the TV or the computer or read the paper, I would surely encounter the darkness more locally. There is the idiot who mowed down two pedestrians just a block from here on Friday as he tried to evade responsibility for a traffic accident he had caused - and sent one bystander to the hospital in critical condition. There are the diagnoses of illness that bring life-changing (and life-threatening) news to people's lives every day. There are the statistics of poverty that place our own city at the top of some lists in America, since up to a quarter of the people in this city live in serious want. I could go on, and so could you; we each know the smaller-scale (but no less painful) tragedies that touch our lives deeply, and make us cringe at the power of darkness, even though there is no footage of them to watch on the Internet or TV.

And so, I cannot watch the gun-waving rants of a young man whose life was somehow - inexplicably to me - lost to darkness. I cannot even read anymore the endless and immediate analyses of his personal history, his state of mind, or his writings. I do not want to get any closer to that darkness - that evil - than I have to. Darkness will find its ways to get close enough to me, and to you.

There are those who call religion little more than a collective emotional salve to be applied to the frightening power of that darkness. Is our proclamation of good news just a pretty garden of denial that makes us feel better, since we have no ready answer for the painful question of why bad things happen to good people?

In the face of that question we come today to a reading from the Book of Revelation, which is the type of thing we would normally pay little attention to, because, after all, who can make any sense of this stuff? Saint John the Divine writes about his vision in which he sees a Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God. (I'm already starting to get confused.) And there are the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders, each with a golden harp and a golden bowl of incense (which means this is already a nightmare for some people). And there is the song they are singing - Worthy is the Lamb - which is perfectly nice when sung to Handel's music, but is it really anything more than good material for an oratorio? What is going on here?

What the twenty-four elders are singing about; what the Lamb is worthy for; the occasion for all the incense and the harps and the bowing, etc…. What it's all about is this scroll that the Lamb has taken from the one who is seated on the throne. The scroll has writing on both sides, and it is sealed with seven seals. And a couple of chapters earlier in John's Revelation a mighty angel had asked the pregnant question: Who is worthy to open the scroll and break the seals? And the episode we read today is the answer to that question. And if you are still with me here, you may be asking, "Who cares?"

Because if you are familiar with the vision of Saint John the Divine, you know that things do not get any simpler or any easy any time soon. The Lamb will begin to open the seven seals of the scroll. And four horsemen will bring conquering power and, slaughter, and justice, and death. And then the souls of the righteous will be robed in white and told to rest a little longer. And when the Lamb gets to the sixth seal there is an earthquake, and the sun turns black, and the moon becomes like blood, and the stars fall to earth, and the sky vanishes like a scroll rolling itself up, and so frightening is all this that even the kings of the earth shout out to the mountains, "Fall on us!"

And do I want to watch this? Can I possibly want to learn about what's going to happen when the seventh seal is opened? Do I want to read on and hear any more of this? It seems like too much for me. Is this really any better than the TV news or the Internet - which at least, mostly, doesn't claim to be a vision of God?

Sure enough, when we get to the seventh seal and the angels start to blow their horns, it sounds more like all hell has broken loose than all of heaven. If this is the journey God is calling us to go one, I feel perfectly happy to be left behind!

More often than not we have stopped paying attention to the rantings of Saint John the Divine long before the Lamb gets to the seventh seal, anyway. In fact, many of us would give more time to the rantings of the Virginia Tech gunman than we would to the seer of Patmos. We get it so typically backwards: absorbed by the musings of madness that illustrate nothing but evil, but almost completely inoculated to the vision that points to a heavenly intent.

All week long, as the heaviness of the sadness of what happened at Virginia Tech has been weighted down in my life even further by the sadness of other deaths closer to home, and the question of why bad things happen to good people has been ringing in my ears, I have been thinking about that scroll: the scroll that the Lamb has taken and is worthy to un-seal. Saint John is very clear in his vision that the scroll has writing on it. But nowhere are its contents read. It is the opening of the seals that unleashes apocalyptic events, not the reading of the scroll. But it seems to me that the scroll - the opening of which sets in motion events that both horrify and confuse me - the scroll itself may be more than what it appears to be. And maybe I am just indulging in the soothing balm of religion when I try to convince myself that written somewhere in the heavens (maybe on that scroll) is an answer to this awful question of why bad things happen to good people.

It seems hopeful to me, you see, that John sees that the scroll has writing on both sides - because I feel certain that the answer to this awful question cannot be simple. And since the opening of the seals on the scroll begins an avalanche of conquering might, slaughter, justice and death; since it clothes the righteous in white and then un-hooks the stars from the sky; since it shakes the earth with the force of every natural disaster ever known… it seems not unreasonable that the text of the scroll - which John never gets to read - may provide some answer about why these things happen. It may provide some end point for all the unanswered "Whys?" uttered in countless, grasping prayers.

Because we give up so easily on John's Revelation, we often forget that it does not end with opening of the seventh seal and the angels blowing their trumpets. We forget that all this drama, this calamity is leading somewhere. We forget that the vision John is given to watch is finally a vision not of tragedy but of hope: a new heaven and a new earth, without sorrow or sighing.

When we give up on the vision too soon, it is often because we read it too much like a set of directions from Mapquest, as though they were a literal description of the route we must follow. And why go there since it sounds so unpleasant as one seal after another is opened? We forget that there is writing on the scroll that might be worth reading - should we ever get to see it. We forget that while John sees much, he is not shown everything.

And we forget that at the end of John's vision there is a new Jerusalem (frankly, something that it is almost impossible for us to imagine, since in my lifetime the real Jerusalem has never stood for anything more than conflict, and violence, and discord, and warfare, and terror). But John sees a vision of a new Jerusalem: a city of peace and hope, where a river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flows through the middle of the street of the city. And that anyone who wishes may take the water of life as a gift.

Last week was a bad week, so bad that I found myself averting my eyes from the evidence of it. It was a week that will have filled many hearts with anguished, one-word prayers: Why?

… to which I have many words of consolation but no real answer.

But there is a scroll, somewhere in the heavens, whose opened seals might unlock the power of every anguished "Why?" ever uttered, and which may, for all I know, hold the answer to those cries.

And since there is hardly an apocalyptic moment described in the vision of Saint John that we have not seen in our lifetimes - conquering power, slaughter, justice, and death:at the very least, the work of the four horsemen - then I am not ready to give up on the final destination of John's vision. I am not ready to stop watching because it seems too much for me. Because if the havoc unleashed by the opening of those seven seals - which is havoc very much like the havoc taking place all around us - if all this havoc is worth paying attention to, then maybe there is also something written on that scroll to be read - maybe there is more to be revealed.

And there is a Lamb who was slain and who is worthy to open the seals of that scroll.

And there is a holy city. There is a new Jerusalem, thank God!

And there is an answer to all our anguished "Whys?"

There is a river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city.

And that is a vision of God's promise and our hope that I am willing to watch and to wait for!

"For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God."

Three weeks ago this morning, at about this hour, I lay on a hospital bed at the Pennsylvania Hospital on my way into surgery to have my broken ankle repaired with a metal plate and seven screws, six of which will remain in there long after I have tossed my crutches away.

As I lay in the pre-operative area, an anesthesiologist told me that they would not have to use a general anesthetic, rather she would administer drugs that would cause me to be in a state of "conscious sedation." Then I'd be given a regional anesthetic, from the waist down, which would actually block the pain of the operation. The point of conscious sedation, it seemed, was to relax me and keep me unaware of what was going on as the hardware was attached to my bones.

It was the second time in several hours I had been put in a state of conscious sedation: the first was in the Emergency Room when a Resident set my broken fibula back into its proper configuration. Apparently, conscious sedation is an induced state in which you are technically awake, but quite relaxed… very relaxed… extremely relaxed… so relaxed that you are basically unaware of what's going on around you. And you are assured that you won't remember anything that happens while you are consciously sedated.

I can tell you that I don't recall one moment of what happened when an ER Resident managed to get the two pieces of my broken bone back into alignment. And I certainly have no recollection of the screws being drilled in during surgery. As a result I am a big fan of conscious sedation - a big fan!

It was an early critique of Christian faith that maybe Jesus wasn't really dead: hadn't actually died on the Cross. The stories of his resurrection could be explained away this way. Without having the terminology for it, perhaps these early critics suspected that Jesus had been in a state of conscious sedation after his ordeal on the Cross. He wasn't dead, just sleeping. There were stories about women coming to the tomb, and strange men already there. Perhaps his followers revived him, dressed his wounds, and spirited him away to some secret place to nurse him back to health and plot his "miraculous" appearances.

The story we heard this morning does not provide definitive proof one way or the other. The women, bearing burial spices, surely thought they were burying a dead man. But what about those strange men in dazzling clothes? They seem to know something the women don't know, something we don't know. They know what's happened to Jesus, they know. And yet at the end of our story this morning we have still not yet seen Jesus.

Most of us would not be satisfied if the story ended here. And we are here this morning, because, in fact, it does go on: the risen Jesus appears, he spends time with his disciples, eats with them, teaches them, prays with them and gives them instructions. And most of us, I expect, have come here convinced that Jesus' resurrection was something more than an awakening from a conscious sedation. And so James Cameron's "discovery" of the tomb, even the very bones of some man named Jesus has not kept us away. We do not believe we have been duped, lied to or deceived.

But when I look around at the world we live in, and I reflect on my experience in the hospital, I wonder if perhaps the real deception we encounter is a self-deception. How do we survive in this world without a measure of conscious sedation - collectively induced?

Here we are smiling and singing as war rages in Iraq, as the Taliban regroups its dangerous forces in Afghanistan. We breathe sighs of relief because 15 British sailors were released from Tehran, but 15 more will die before long. It sometimes feels as thought it takes a deliberate act of conscious sedation to walk the streets of this city - even in this neighborhood where the homeless live side-by-side with the wealthy, but even more so if you were to go south or west or north of here. Just thinking about dreadful statistics of poverty, violence, abuse and death across the river in Camden is enough to make me wish for a dose of conscious sedation! Following the presidential campaign seems to be a program designed to induce conscious sedation. The City of New Orleans remains at least a partial ruins, but it does not keep us up at night because we remain consciously sedate to its woes. Add to these things our own worries: our bills, our ailing parents or sick children, the neuroses that give us worry about our friends, our desire for more money, or more house, or more land, or more time, or more freedom.

How do we survive in this world without adopting - at least from time to time - an air of conscious sedation, in which we know we are awake, but we sincerely hope (and expect) that we will not remember anything?

Wouldn't it be nice to just relax, really relax, really really relax and just be basically unaware of what's happening around us sometimes? And maybe it would even be nice not to remember. Not to remember New Orleans, or Baghdad, or the credit card bills, or the diagnosis you have told no one about yet, or the way your mother will not know you when you go to see her next?

It would be easy to become a big fan of conscious sedation - ask the people who come here to AA meetings: they know. They know how seductive it is to try to live in a state of conscious sedation - where nothing can harm you, nothing overwhelm you, with no pain, no tears, nothing.

When I awoke from my surgery, I didn't remember anything. I hadn't even laid eyes on the surgeon - didn't know what he looked like and couldn't remember his name. And they told me it would take a while for the feeling to return to my feet and legs, and then I would feel some pain. But of course, I was back in one piece.

Don't we come to his tomb year after year, somewhat numb from the pains and debts and indignities and injustices, from the wars and the wounds, from the lies and the addictions, from betrayals and lost love and dashed hopes? And are we hoping that God will wake us up, give us the feeling back in our toes, even send us some pain - anything to remind us that we can feel, that we can hope, that we can love?

And here we find two men, dressed in dazzling apparel. And they are surprised that we, like the women who came there that first Easter, expect so little. All we want is to be awakened from our conscious sedation, to get the feeling back, perhaps to learn the name of our surgeon, have a look at him, maybe meet him for a few minutes.

But the reason for our singing this morning, the reason for our joy is that we have been wrong all along, and now we know it. We were not consciously sedate - in need only of a gradual awakening, waiting for the feeling to return to our toes - no more than Jesus was only consciously sedate. In truth we have been dead - brought right down into the grave by all those things that we thought only made us numb. And so Jesus met us where we are - all the way dead, not just consciously sedate.

And today, when we had hoped for nothing more than the feeling back in our toes, had expected little more, perhaps, than some hardware to get us back on our feet, when would have settled for an awakening. Today we stand at an empty tomb that is every bit as much ours as it was Jesus'. And like the women, we are perplexed, maybe even afraid. Were we sleeping? Can we remember? Is it over? Am I whole again?

And we hear the truth:

We were not just sleeping; we had died. But if Christ is risen to new life, then it is the assurance that we are, too. And when the truth of this great blessing dawns on us, then it brings a tingling to our toes, so to speak, that is more than the feeling coming back; it is the strength to rise with the one who first rose from death, and to walk with him, and finally, to live!

Thanks be to God!

The physician Paul Farmer, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and has established hospitals in Haiti for the poorest of the poor, has been known to walk for seven hours to make house calls to his Haitian patients. Recently he was here at the University of Pennsylvania, where I had the privilege to hear him speak about his work. Although he did not let on while he was at Penn, I take it from what I've read about Dr. Farmer that he is something of a religious man. He has said that he finds the charter for his work in the 25th chapter of Matthew's gospel, and is inspired by the writings of Dietrich Bonhoefer.

At Penn Dr. Farmer showed us photos of an emaciated patient suffering from both tuberculosis and AIDS. Joseph was 26 yeas old and barely more than a skin-draped skeleton. His family had already purchased a coffin for him. He, himself, told his doctors, "I'm dead already…." Indeed, to many people this self diagnosis from a poor Haitian would have seemed accurate

But Farmer does not treat his patients as though they are poor Haitians. He treated Joseph with antiretroviral and anti-tuberculous drugs. Within weeks he was up and walking. And the photo of him six months later that Dr. Farmer showed us was of a healthy young man with a child in his arms.

The medical and government establishments, Farmer told us, believe that it is not "cost effective" to treat cases like Joseph's. Perhaps borrowing from our own Ben Franklin, the establishment prefers an inexpensive ounce of prevention for the poor rather than a costly pound of treatment or cure. Prevention is cheap. Treatment is not. And the people of Haiti, by and large, are very poor.

Still, Farmer says, "I never heard a patient say, 'Hey, I'm a poor Haitian woman with HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis, but I understand it is not cost-effective to treat me.'"

Farmer thinks that the medical establishment treats cost-effectiveness "like a religion," he told us. But clearly, to him it is a very bad choice of religion, founded on what one writer called "the false belief that some people's lives matter more than other's lives."

Most of us have probably subscribed in some ways to this religion of cost-effectiveness. We do it when we shop at Sam's Club or Costco or Walmart. We do it when we drive to New Jersey to buy liquor and wine. We do it when we decide to travel off-season, or when we read the paper on line rather than buy a hard copy. We do it when we buy our cheaply made clothing and shoes. If we were in Southern California, I promise you we would hire our Mexican gardener because it is deeply cost-effective. We make decisions about our housing, our political contributions, even our dining out based on how cost-effective we expect the results to be. Perhaps we even apply some formula of cost-benefit analysis to the decision of how much to drop in the collection plate each week. We would never claim this as our religion, but we have become very good at practicing it nonetheless.

It is the practice of this religion that has left most of us able to cite within half a percentage point the available rates for mortgage refinancing this week but probably unable to name even one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, (like halving the number of people in the world who live on less than a dollar a day.)

The truth is that it seems somehow cost-effective to most of us to be familiar with mortgage rates, if for no other reason than to assure ourselves that it's still OK to rent rather than buy. And really, do we think it can possibly be cost effective to try to eradicate malaria or HIV-AIDS in Africa (another Millennium Development Goal)? Can we even be bothered with the math? Do we even need to try?

"Hey, I'm just a poor African woman with malaria or HIV-AIDS, but I understand that it's not cost-effective to treat me." Who are you talking to, lady? Did we even ask?

Today we are pretending to go with Jesus to the Cross. In truth, despite the expense of the musicians, and the vestments and the overhead of opening the church; despite even the cost of gas to drive here and the parking; even if you stay parked on the street and get a ticket while you go out to brunch, in truth we have chosen the most cost-effective way to go to the Cross with Jesus. I know the seats are not that comfortable, but still, you could do worse.

And the question that has been nagging me these past few weeks since I heard Paul Farmer speak is this: is the Crucifixion cost-effective? Is the relative cost of this act of God commensurate to the effect? Is the Cross cost-effective?

Another way of asking this question is to wonder whether in the shadow of the Cross some people's lives matter more (or less) than others? As in most things, the answer to this question may depend primarily on one's perspective.

From our own perspective, the Passion of Jesus Christ is exceptionally cost-effective. After all what has it cost us to come and hear that Jesus died for us? What has it cost us to sit for an hour or so under the shadow of his Cross? What has it cost us to hear the promise of his love, his assurance - if offered to the penitent thief, then surely offered to you and me - that today we will be with him in Paradise! Well done! Nicely sung! Always look on the bright side of life and all that!

It is enough for us to hear it now and then - that Jesus died for us. It is enough for us to commemorate the moment in wood and stone and paint and glass and music. It is enough for us to shed a sentimental tear at this love unknown, to reach out our hands for this bread, to dampen our lips with this wine. It is enough. An hour and a half, after all - and yes, Jesus loves me! What a remarkably cost-effective Cross this is that has so easily bought us our freedom, our forgiveness, our lives and still leaves us time to get to brunch! I never heard a person say, "Hey, I'm a poor sinner who has done pretty much what I like in the world, but I understand that it is not cost-effective for God to save me."

But as a matter of perspective, I wonder how this looks to Jesus.

He has been betrayed by one of his own followers. He has been handed over to an unsympathetic and foreign authority. He has been interrogated, accused, unjustly sentenced. He has been jeered by a mob, deserted, now, by the rest of his disciples. He has been stripped, mocked, spat upon. He has stumbled his way up this hillside, he has carried the heavy wood, the sweat pouring from his face. He has been sentenced to die as a joke: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. He has now felt the pain of the nails - pain I pray I will never know. He has prayed his last prayer and then, it seems, given up on prayer. He has felt the heavy agony of his own breath slowly evacuating. And finally he has breathed his last.

And all this, we are told, for you and for me? Can the cost of this act ever be even roughly commensurate with the effect? Look at us?! Can it?!

The truth of the matter is that, like that Haitian patient Joseph, we would have done well to purchase our coffins. Like him, we might have said, we are dead already. Because we should have long ago drowned in our greed, our abuse of one another, of this planet, our lust for blood and war, our regular assumption that some people's lives matter more (or less) than others, and our inexhaustible willingness to flirt with the cynical religion of cost-effectiveness.

The Good News of the Passion of Jesus Christ is that his Cross is not cost-effective at all. We have never managed to show the effects of this great cost God bore to save us from ourselves. Here and there, perhaps, when we ditch the religion of cost-effectiveness and care for the poor, the price tag be damned. But has God done well in this deal? Has his Passion been matched by our promise?

The mystery of God's love for us is that it is so deeply un-cost-effective. There the Son of God suffers and dies - not because he knows that it will make us good, but with the promise that it can. The passion and death of Christ are flagrantly and extravagantly not cost-effective: all this and even his own followers don't get it, run away scared, and deny they ever knew him.

But even now, all these years later, there is a Harvard professor who will walk seven miles in Haiti to make house calls; and if there are still those, like him, who refuse to believe that some people's lives matter more than others, then maybe we begin to see in them the wisdom of God's Cross. Maybe we begin to believe that it could be possible to halve the number of people who live on less than a dollar a day. Maybe we could find a way to eradicate malaria and AIDS, and even treat poor people who suffer with these diseases.

Maybe we could think this way and make these choices because we learned from the Cross of Christ something about that love unknown before the Cross: a love that has made the math of cost-effectiveness look somehow unfair. Because how could a cost-effective God ever love us? How could a cost-effective Christ ever suffer and die for us? And how could a cost-effective Cross ever save us?

You and I are sinners: selfish, greedy, stupid and weak - magnificent, it's true - but all the more tragically so because we know in our hearts that left to our own devices, like that patient Joseph we are already dead. We might as well have bought the coffins; some of us already have.

But at the Cross, God will listen no one say "I'm just a poor sinner and I realize it is not cost-effective to save me."

At the Cross, God shows us the mystery of a love unknown to us before: a love that promises that no one's life matters more or less than another's. The long walk to that Cross has somehow visited every soul; the hands that are nailed there somehow touched every head; the arms stretched out there somehow reaching every life - waiting only for us to stretch out our own arms and return the embrace.