Saint Mark's Church

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

 

 

A long time ago back in Palestine land,

was the death of a man on a Cross.

And they buried the chap in the dirt and the sand,

‘neath a stone that was covered in moss.

 

The disciples dismayed; they were scared to their wits,

and they hid behind doors out of fear.

There they huddled together like a gaggle of twits,

not suspecting their Savior was near.

 

There was one of them who you’ll remember by name,

“Doubting Thomas” he’s called by us all.

He’s been branded for ever with that odd kind of fame,

That reminds us his faith was too small.

 

For he was not there at that magical hour

when although all the doors, they were locked,

Jesus rose from the grave, and to show them his power,

came to visit, which left them all shocked.

 

“Peace be with you,” he said, and he breathed on them then,

thereby sharing the great Holy Ghost.

“Give the gift of forgiveness to women and men”

said their Savior, their Lord, and their Host.

 

How they murmured and wondered, how their sleep was disturbed,

They were ten, minus Judas and Tom.

And their thoughts were confused, and their whole lives perturbed;

this new peace had not brought them much calm.

 

The would meet all together, they would talk and they’d pray,

hid away in a dark, secret room,

they went over and over details of that day,

which had ended in tears at the tomb.

 

And they marveled together, they wondered in awe,

how he’d risen from death, as he’d said,

and almost they couldn’t believe what they saw,

for they truly had thought he was dead.

 

Eventually Tom was together with them,

and the news was just too good to keep:

that God, in his wisdom, had not condemned

to death the Great Shepherd of sheep:

 

“We have seen the Lord Jesus!” his friends told him that day,

though to Tom this was hard to believe.

“It can’t be,” said the man in his own doubting way,

prepared only and ever to grieve.

 

“Let me see the deep prints where they drove the nails in,

let me thrust my own hand in his side.

Don’t you know that I loved him as though he were kin,

don’t you know that for three days I cried

 

out of sadness for all that we seem to have lost,

out of fear that it never was true,

out of horror to know that his life was the cost

of the lessons he taught me and you.”

 

“Get a grip,” said his friends, Peter and Paul,

“Get a grip,” said James and said John.

“Don’t you know that he’s come to appear to us all?

Wait and see, for he’ll be here anon.”

 

It was not long thereafter, when they gathered, those ten,

That the Lord came to be with his friends.

And Thomas was there, to make eleven of them,

and so this was his chance for amends.

 

“Peace be with you,” said Jesus as he entered inside

by the door that he never unlatched.

“Stretch out your hand, feel my hands and my side,

you’ll see that the wounds are un-patched.”

 

Then famously Thomas did fall to his knees,

with a gasp, and a shout to exclaim,

“My Lord and my God!  Great Jehovah!  Big Cheese!”

or something a tad less profane.

 

“Doubting Thomas,” said Jesus, “you’ve seen and believe,

let me say, I don’t want to be mean,

but blest is he who the truth can perceive

though my hands and my side have not seen.”

 

When we hear this old story the way it’s been told,

and the words that to Thomas were said,

the lesson, we think, is to hear Jesus scold

him for failing to get through his head

 

the good news that his Lord and his Master had ris’n

from the grave, ‘neath the dust and the stone;

that Death, though he tried, could not fashion a prison

that would keep Christ from claiming his throne.

 

But perhaps there’s a lesson that’s still yet more pressing

in this story for Christians to glean.

Perhaps it’s the message of Jesus’s blessing

for believers who never have seen

 

the prints of the nails, or the wound in his side:

the evidence of our Lord’s death.

As though proof was the best thing that he could provide,

and not the Spirit he gave with his breath.

 

But that Spirit has carried the message of love

to all the four corners of earth:

from Jerusalem, winging its way like a dove,

as far as both Philly and Perth…

 

I can tell you, I’ve seen with my very own eyes

the power of our risen Lord.

How it lifts human hearts as high as the skies,

how it vanquishes even the sword.

 

It’s a power that’s given from way up on high,

it’s a force that can’t be disguised;

and it signals that Jesus, the Master, is nigh,

and it’s given to all the baptized.

 

Which is why we bring children, with fathers and moms,

with godparents, uncles, and aunts,

after reading the lessons and singing the psalms

to the water that’s poured into fonts,

 

where the Spirit, who to those first ten men was given,

is shared with our own children here:

a sign and a symbol that all is forgiven,

and a promise to chase away fear

 

of everything evil that makes our faith falter,

with grace and with power divine,

that same grace that leads us all to the altar

to share holy Bread, holy Wine.

 

And when in our faith we have been through the waters

of Baptism, and of new life,

we give thanks for the gift to our sons and our daughters

that promises fin’ly the strife

 

is o’er, the great battle won, and the Lord,

in his glory has rose

from the dead for all people, the great human horde:

we are all of us, those he has chose.

 

And sometimes it may be that you start to think

that your faith is too tiny, too small.

And you’ll fear that your heart is beginning to shrink,

and you’ll doubt that God loves you at all.

 

You’ll think back on Thomas, and remember the scolding;

in the midst of your doubt you might dare

to fall on your knees, and right there start folding

your fingers together in prayer.

 

And the answer you’ll hear to your prayer that hour

won’t be one that is mean or unkind,

“Blest are you, my dear child,” says the voice full of pow’r,

“Blest in heart, and in soul, and in mind.

 

“Oh I know that you think that your faith is minute,

Oh I know you think it’s not enough;

But even small faith can bear you much fruit,

and I’d say you’ve got the right stuff.”

 

The lesson today is of blessing, not curses,

and if I had bells I would chime it;

but since all I have is these words and these verses,

the best I could do was to rhyme it.

 

So when you feel low, you’ve got nothing but doubt

and you’re certain that you have been messing

life up, and you think that you just want to pout,

then remember this little blessing:

 

Blest are you, my belovéd, my child, my friend,

blest are you, my dear jelly bean,

for you have had faith, and on God you depend,

even though with your eyes you’ve not seen.

 

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 April, 2012

Saint Mark’s Church

 

On the occasion of the baptism of

Charles Frederick Reinhardt, Jr.

 

 

 

 

 

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

The food at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem is adequate, but not more than adequate.  And if I am going to travel all the way to the Holy Land – as 22 of us from Saint Mark’s did about six months ago – I am going to find food that is better than adequate.  On our journey we maintained a pretty full itinerary, so there was not a lot of time to search out good food, but I did my best; poking my way through the winding alleys of the Old City, taking the train to the Mehane Yehuda Market and consulting online reviews to find the best places to eat.  I’m happy to report that I found some memorable meals in Jerusalem, as well as some good Israeli wines!

The Ambassador Hotel sits uphill from the Old City of Jerusalem along the Nablus Road.  And on my fast and furious expeditions to find food, and the nearest liquor store, I regularly made my way down this road, past the far swankier American Colony Hotel, the British cathedral, and then past a little sign on a street that turned off to the left as I walked downhill: a street named after Conrad Shick, and a sign pointing to The Garden Tomb.  This tomb is the alternative site to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – the traditional site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, where pilgrims line up for hours (as we did) to get a chance to stoop low and visit the strange supposed burial place of Jesus – which really hardly resembles a tomb at all, and which requires more than a little imagination to connect with the image of Jesus’ death and burial, which were supposed to take place on a hill outside the city wall, since, there is no evidence that you are on a hill, and you are well inside the current walls of the city.  Nevertheless, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher has been recognized as the likely place of Jesus’ burial at least since the 4^th century, and if it marks the place of his burial, then it is also the kind of Ground Zero of his resurrection: the site of the original Easter

The Garden Tomb, by contrast, has been identified as a possible site only since the 19^th century.  And it tends to have a certain currency with people from Protestant churches, who may feel a bit put off by the chanting monks, the flickering candles, and the burning incense over at the Holy Sepulcher.

A curious pilgrim, open to possibilities, with no ax to grind, with only two competing sites to compare, could easily visit both the Holy Sepulcher and the Garden Tomb on a visit to Jerusalem, especially if his hotel was just up the road from them both, and he had to pass one on his way to get to the other.  But I had meals to scope out, and restaurant menus to inspect; my sorties down the Nablus Road led me right past the turn-off to the Garden Tomb for five days in a row.  But I never even flinched as I went in search of olives and cheeses, and Halvah, and other delicious things – and wine.  And, of course, we’d already been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – if you’ve seen one Messiah’s tomb, I figured, you’ve seen ‘em all.  As I say, a clearer head might have decided that if you have traveled half way around the world to visit holy sites, and two different places contend to be the holiest of them all, what’s the harm in visiting both of them?  But I had pistachios, and pomegranates to track down and taste.   I’d already cast my lot with the ancients at the Holy Sepulcher – why muddy the waters?

To many people, the mere fact that there is more than one potential spot where Jesus may have been buried, more than one possible Ground Zero of the Resurrection, provides ample evidence of the foolishness of the faith that so many others have placed in Jesus, lo these many centuries.  If we cannot even locate with any measure of certainty the very places where his Cross stood, where his Body lay, and where disciples discovered an empty tomb on that first Easter morning, does that not cast some significant doubt on the stories themselves?  Here was a man who claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God, whose life was given, the scriptures tell us, for the salvation of the whole world.  Could it have been so impossible to mark the spot of his burial, to remember where it was that the empty tomb was located?  Wouldn’t someone have placed a pile of rocks there?  Or planted tree?  Or drawn a map?

The suspicion is that these things did not happen as the scriptures report them; that if a man named Jesus of Nazareth was crucified outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and if his body was placed in a tomb, then the dusty remains of his flesh and bones are lying there now; that the reason we cannot say for certain where the empty tomb of the risen Christ is to be found, is because there is no such thing: no such thing as the empty tomb, no such thing as the Christ, the anointed of God, and no such thing as the Resurrection.

But there is plenty of delicious food to be found in Jerusalem.  And I highly recommend the fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice from street vendors, and I can give you a recommendation for a really good restaurant just outside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City.  But I digress.

Maybe there is another reason that the precise location of the empty tomb of Jesus is in some doubt.  Maybe this question of where exactly Jesus rose from the dead need not undermine faith, but could strengthen it.  Maybe God has not unfolded his plans in such a way as to be successfully litigated with forensic evidence, but has, instead, been at work in subtler, more personal ways.  Maybe it’s a good thing that we don’t know with absolute certainty where the empty tomb of Jesus is, since knowing, or thinking you know, seems to provide Christians with something to fight over, as much as anything else.  And maybe it’s somewhat unimportant to know which of the two contending sites in Jerusalem is the real empty tomb of Jesus.

Because the truth is that there are empty tombs in churches and in homes and in the hearts of God’s people all over the world this morning.  These are the places where Jesus’ rising matters this morning, and every morning.

It’s in our lives, our homes, our church families, after all that death and his accomplices have been at work.

It’s your child who was rushed to the hospital, whose bed you stood by and prayed by and waited by, hoping the doctors were skilled enough that a miracle wouldn’t be needed.

It’s your mother who cannot remember who you are anymore, and who looks at you with a vacant stare.

It’s your sister, your brother who received the diagnosis last week, and who now must decide whether to undergo the misery of a treatment that may or may not provide a cure.

It’s your friend who was in a freak accident and will never walk again.

It’s your beloved whose body has been wracked by the chemo and the radiation, and yet who still doesn’t know if the cancer is gone.

It’s your daughter who lost the pregnancy.

It’s your brother who has been languishing in prison.

It’s your son who refuses to admit he has a problem, refuses to go to AA, refuses to let go of his addiction.

It’s your father who finally died, and whose death and memory has left a hole in your life bigger than any you ever knew he could fill.

Death, disaster, sickness and despair are at work in your life and mine, right here, right now.  We do not need to travel to Jerusalem to find them.  And if we had to bring all that threatens and frightens and condemns us to the empty tomb in a far away place, we could never afford the additional baggage fees.

The Resurrection has not been fixed by God to a tomb in Jerusalem because you and I don’t need a Resurrection that happened once, long ago, in a faraway place.  We need a Resurrection here and now, in our lives, in the things that are killing us even now.  We don’t need to go in search of hope through the winding streets of an ancient city.  We need hope in Philadelphia this morning!

There is a tradition, reported in the scriptures, that says that when Jesus died, the tombs of the dead were opened, and the bodies of the dead were raised, and they walked around and visited their friends and families.  Far-fetched though this tradition may sound, I think it makes sense if we don’t insist on a finding a single empty tomb for Jesus.  I think the dead were making way for Jesus, who was claiming every tomb he could find as his own, and he pushed the bodies of the dead up, out of his way as he came up from their tombs, sharing a measure of his new life with them as he went.

Perhaps you think there is a tomb already prepared for you or for someone you love. Even if you don’t, the time will come when you do, when you realize that the coldness of a tomb lies as close at hand as the next sunrise, and you can’t be sure which will greet you the next morning.  This is the human experience, the reality of our lives.  Which means that the most important tomb this Easter is not either of the ones in Jerusalem that claim to be the tomb of the Savior of the world.  The most important tomb this Easter is the one you have imagined in your mind, that grabs you by the throat and leaves you struggling to catch your breath.

It may not be your own tomb.  It may be the tomb of your spouse, your partner, your parent, or your child.  It is the tomb whose chill you cannot shake, the tomb you never fail to visit in your imagination.  This tomb contains the remains of more than just a body: it holds your hope, your dream, your life in its unforgiving darkness, and although you may try to avoid it with forays into various distractions, this tomb owns your imagination like nothing else, for you are always ready for something to die in it, and to be buried for ever.

I might never see the sign that points to that tomb, the most important tomb of your imagination, the tomb that holds the end of the thing you love.  I might ignore it just as easily as I ignored the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, and so might everyone else in this church, and everywhere in the world today.  But Jesus will not ignore that tomb.  He will claim it as his own.  He moved into it three days ago, and he has been renovating.

Jesus has pushed everything that could ever die in the tomb of your imagination out of his way, and in the process he has loaned new life to the previous inhabitants of this tomb.  For nothing can die in the presence of this great life.  No tomb can be a final resting place after the Resurrection.  We don’t need to decide which tomb was Jesus’ burial place, because his burial hardly matters – only his rising matters.  And he is risen from every tomb, in every corner of the world, on every Easter, and every day till he claims all creation for himself again.

After this mass is over, like you, I will start thinking about food.  Well, I might start thinking about food before you do, but you take the point.  After church this morning, we will go our ways in search of our Easter brunches, our Easter dinners.  I already have a schedule written down: the ham goes in the oven at 2:30, I put my parents to work at 4. etc, etc.  Just as I was distracted by many things in Jerusalem, and never visited the Garden Tomb, you will be distracted soon enough, and Easter will begin to recede for another year.

But Christ is not through rising from the dead – though he has already accomplished it.  He is rising from every tomb that fills your heart and mine with dread.  Jesus is rising from the dead, indeed he is risen, and it hardly matters which tomb was his before; he has no need of it now, he is risen indeed, Alleluia!

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

At least two locations in Jerusalem claim to be the Upper Room: the place where Jesus shared his last supper with his disciples, and where the gift of the Eucharist was first shared.  One of those locations is called the Cenacle.  It is the better known of the two, outside the ancient city wall, on Mount Zion.  The other is to be found in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City, where one of the winding, walled streets makes a dogleg of a turn, not too far from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  A sign announces that you are approaching Saint Mark’s Convent.  Passing through the entrance and the outer courtyard, you go through another set of doors into a small, ornate church, at the back of which is a narrow staircase that leads to the Upper Room.

Except the stairs here don’t lead up; they go down.  Everything in Jerusalem is built on the ruins of something older.  The old Syriac church of Saint Mark is built on the ruins of an older church, an older structure that was destroyed at least once, about 70 AD in the Roman sack of Jerusalem.  Older versions of Jerusalem lie buried beneath the current version – which looks plenty old to me – and so a faithful visitor must now go down a set of stairs to enter the Upper Room.

There is a certain cognitive dissonance to this experience that is hard to escape.  It’s not just that there is almost nothing about the windowless, plain room that suggests it is a holy place; that there are almost no signs and little feeling of sanctity to the place; that the modern electric lights  - Home Depot-style, faux-crystal fixtures that are wired to the ceiling - rob the space of any ambiance.  There is something wrong with the idea of walking downstairs to get to the Upper Room.  You simply feel that you cannot be going to the same place that Jesus and his disciples went.  It feels more like you are entering a kind of M.C.Escher drawing, in which stairs that seem to lead down actually lead up.  But this cannot be.

Indeed, it cannot be.  And the very name for the kind of structures that Escher drew – for instance, stairs that appear to lead down but also go up– the name for this is an “impossible object.”

An impossible object is a 2-dimensional representation that the viewer perceives instantly as a projection of a 3-dimenstional object, although it is not actually geometrically possible for such an object to exist in real space.  Imagine, if you can, those images Escher drew of staircases that seem to lead a person in any and every conceivable direction: up, down, over, and under.  In isolation, any one section of the drawing seems to make sense, but at the connecting points, somehow things go awry, even though it’s hard to say why.  Look at the whole, picture, though, and you can see that there is no up, down, or sideways to it; no clear orientation to ground the viewer; no way to say what’s up and what is down.  An explanation of impossible objects tells us that “in most cases the impossibility becomes apparent after viewing the figure for a few seconds.  However, the initial impression [of possibility] remains even after it has been contradicted.”

All of which leads me to wonder about the Upper Room of tonight’s gospel.  Not just about the precise location of it in Jerusalem, but about what took place there, about the gift that we are told was given, the commandment that was delivered, the example that was made, the lesson we are meant to learn from tonight’s gospel.  Having once walked down a set of stairs to reach the Upper Room, I find myself wondering if the Upper Room is an impossible object?  Are the lessons this gospel seeks to teach us impossible objects?  And if they are, would that mean that the bread and the wine – those crucial gifts of tonight’s celebration – are also impossible objects? 

Or more precisely: the Body and Blood of Jesus that Christians have believed for two millennia are hidden beneath the forms of bread and wine – are these impossible objects that we have allowed ourselves to perceive in such a way that they could not actually exist?  And do we cling to the initial impression of what these elements are, even after that impression has been contradicted by a vast array of evidence in the world?

To put it another way: Is the church’s teaching about tonight – that Jesus gave us the gift of his Real Presence in the bread and the wine of the Last Supper, and that when we pray the prayers, and say the words, and believe with our hearts the things we must pray and say and believe, then he is really, truly among us – is all this just a staircase leading downstairs into a supposedly Upper Room?  A story, whose cognitive dissonance can only be resolved with a willful ignorance, sometimes called faith?

To much of the world, this is how what we do tonight, and every day of the year here at Saint Mark’, looks: like a bunch of people who have been duped into believing that you can walk downstairs to get to the Upper Room; that an Impossible Object is actually the Real Thing.  But what we must remember about tonight is this: that tonight’s Eucharist has been built on the ruins of older Eucharists.  One Mass is built on the bricks of many masses that came before it, even if those bricks were left only for rubble before.

How do we determine whether or not the bread we take and bless and break and share tonight is really Jesus’ Body?  How do we determine if the wine is really his Blood?  We may have to excavate this Eucharist, to dig down to the layers deep below: the older Eucharists this one was built on – which is exactly what the church is inviting us to do tonight.  We dig down past 163 years’ worth of masses right here on this spot, celebrated by my thirteen predecessors, and the men and women who worked with them.  Then we dig down past the colonial Holy Communions, that were probably kept on Christmases and Easters in this city, but not much more than that.

Because this is a holy archaeology, we don’t have to sail the seas to find the fossil record of the masses that prayed for the ends of wars and the well-being of the men and women who fought them.  If we are lucky we will discover the evidence of the masses (though not enough of them) that prayed for the safety of Jews who were being slaughtered in Poland; of masses that beatified Nicholas and Alexandra, that were terrified by the tricoleur, that gave thanks for Columbus’ return, that damned the onslaught of the Moors, that rejoiced at Fra Angelico’s painting, that set the Inquisitor’s imagination aflame, that prompted Francis to stand naked in the square, that crowned Charlemagne, that rang out in the chants of monastic chapels, that fled persecutions, that huddled nervously behind closed doors or in catacombs, that strained to remember what it was exactly Jesus had said, before it was written down.  And, of course, deep beneath the stratified, sometimes ossified layers of all these masses, we get to the wide, wooden boards of a floor in an Upper Room, where the Twelve are reclining around a table with the Rabbi.

It is dim here, so many layers beneath the Mass we began tonight, but there is enough light to see by, and enough quiet to hear by, and to remember what this first Communion was all about: when the Son of the living God, who had been since the world began, came down to this Upper Room, and although he had the power of God, took on himself instead the girdle of service and washed the feet of those he’d called to serve him and his mission.  Down here we can still hear the echo of his ancient words, “This is my Body.  This is my Blood.”  We have had to dig down deep to get to this Upper Room, but we can feel the power of his question reverberating in the dirt and stone around us: “Do you know what I have done to you?”  Do you know?

What he has done is given us these Impossible Objects of his Body and his Blood.  They appear to us with so many dimensions: they remind us of the way he cradled his disciples’ feet in his hands as he washed the dust and the dirt from them.  They bear to us the words of his only commandment: that we love one another just as he loved his disciples.

This scant half-ounce of dry wafer and less than a half-ounce of wine transmit the truth of God’s love: the force that called light from darkness; the covenant that freed a people from their captivity and led them to a promised land; the wisdom and the strength of Solomon; the power that healed the sick, made the lame to walk and the blind to see; the voice of the prophets; the mercy that comforted the imprisoned and those who mourn; the hope that seemed to be buried with Lazarus; the beauty that glowed beneath Magdalene’s curls; the patience and strength of a Cyrenean’s shoulder; the faith of an impetuous fisherman; and the life that seemed to die on the Cross, but that was really gathering strength.  All this in a speck of bread and a drop of wine!

These are Impossible Objects!  They appear to be barely more than 2-dimensional, and we quickly realize that they cannot possibly exist in the way we say they do in real time and real space.  The bread and the wine have not changed; I have no power to turn them into something they are not.  Quickly our minds perceive the contradiction here, and yet somehow the initial impression remains.

Tonight, we are gathered together to remember that an older version of this sacred meal lies beneath the current version (which looks plenty old to so many people).  And that these days, yes, you must go down a set of stairs to reach the Upper Room.

Tonight, we rejoice in that little staircase that leads downstairs to Upper Room.  We delight in the impossibility of such an object as a staircase that could ever lead us to that holy place, that holy time, that holy company, that holy communion. And, more specifically, tonight we rejoice in the Impossible Objects of Christ’s Body and Blood – barely more that 2-dimensional on the altar, it seems; practically less than 2-dimensional to so much of the world that has given up on them. 

These are Impossible Objects: this Body, this Blood.  They cannot possibly be what we say that they are, and when we look closely at them, we see the contradiction, for indeed, they appear to all the world to be nothing more than bread, nothing more than wine.  And yet… the initial impression remains even it after it has been contradicted.  And it does so because of the complicated and beautiful sedimentary layers of all the Eucharists this present one is built upon.  Because since that first Eucharist all those centuries ago, men and women have held out their hands, opened their mouths, and been fed.

Tonight we have walked toward this ancient staircase that we are told leads to an Upper Room, even though any idiot can see that it leads down, where it can only get dark, and where we are sure to encounter no one but the dead. 

But we go downstairs in faith; we taste, and see: we arise, and we live!

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Maundy Thursday 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Allow me to set the scene: An omnipotent, virtually omniscient power is in charge; long ago the inhabitants of the ruler’s land rebelled against the ruler’s authority and asserted their own will, only to be punished, condemned to a lifetime of hard labor.  What’s more, the omnipotent ruler now demands payment in return for the original offence: a ransom to satisfy the ruler’s own sense of justice, and which requires the spilling of blood.  These details are the basic exposition of the fantastically popular young-readers’ novel, The Hunger Games.  And if you’ve read the book or seen the movie you know what ensues.  The ransom is to be paid in the form of tributes: a boy and a girl from every district in the land, chosen by lottery to travel to the Capital for a sort of gladiatorial contest to the death in which only one of the 24 young combatants will be left standing.  It is a perverse and cruel arrangement designed to keep the people of the districts in their place by dint of fear, and by the constant reinforcement of the idea that the rulers hold the lives of the people in their hands, and those lives can be taken from them at almost any time.

The ‘Hunger Games’ refers to the actual contest in which the 24 young boys and girls are pitted against each other to fight to the death.  The lone survivor will be rewarded with enough wealth to banish the hunger that would normally be his or her lot in life, living in poverty in a district outside the Capital, working to produce whatever the privileged members of the ruling class require for their comfort.

One of the most perverse aspects of the Hunger Games is the way the contestants – the tributes, who have been torn from the bosom of their families and the safety of their communities to face a nearly certain death – they way they are encouraged to become willing participants in their own demise; coached to play along on the off-chance it might help them win; tutored to embrace their momentary celebrity; molded into at least apparently eager players of a game designed to kill them.

What you may not realize is that the expository outline of The Hunger Games also follows the basic contours of one of the classic and most enduring articulations of Christian theology:  An omnipotent and omniscient God holds all creation in his hand.  Long ago, the first inhabitants of creation rebelled against God’s authority and asserted their own wills, only to be punished, exiled from Paradise, and condemned to a lifetime of hard labor.  What’s more, God decides that he requires payment in return for the original offence, the original sin: a ransom to satisfy his own sense of justice, which will require the spilling of blood.

This is the short-handed version of a much longer answer often provided to the ancient question: Why did God become Man?  It’s a question that was led by a star to Bethlehem, settled for a while in a stable there, grew up in Nazareth, taught throughout the Galilee, and eventually ended up in Jerusalem, or more precisely on a green hill, outside the city wall, where a man hung on a cross between two thieves… which is where the story has brought us today.  What are we to make of this story with all its strange twists and turns, like the frenzy of palm-waving procession that only days later is transposed into shouts demanding that the man all those palms were waved for should now be crucified?

We sometimes look at the Cross and assume its message is self-evident.  But is the message of the cross any more self-evident that the wisdom of the Hunger Games, the demand for tribute in order to right ancient wrongs, and to do so with the spilling of blood?

That story opens when a young 12-year old girl is chosen to be a tribute from her district: to be sent the to the Hunger Games where she will surely die.  But her older sister, in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice volunteers to go instead, not because she believes she can win, but because she will do anything to save her little sister.  Her act of selflessness is Christ-like not only because of the generosity of self-offering, but because it will almost surely cost the girl her life.  She is choosing death out of love so that another may live.  But seeing this parallel doesn’t make the story of the Hunger Games less perverse, and it may suggest to us that the story of the Crucifixion is more so.

As fate would have it, the girl’s counterpart – the boy who is chosen as tribute from the same district – is as guileless as she is.  He, too, believes he is doomed, sure that he will be slaughtered by those more cunning and powerful than he is.  He says that his only hope is to “die as myself….  I don’t want them to change me in there.  Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.”  But he knows that the Hunger Games are designed to do just that.

It transpires that the boy and the girl  - only one of whom is allowed to live and win the Hunger Games – fall in love with each other, more or less.  As the Games begin and then unfold, not only are they unable to murder each other, they find ways to help each other survive.  This turn of events is not much appreciated by the organizers of the games, the People in Charge.  And in the film, a telling bit of dialogue is added between the President of the Capital, and the chief organizer of the Games.

“Why do you think we have a winner?” the president asks, and then provides his own answer.  “Hope.  It is the only thing stronger than fear.  A little hope is effective.  A lot of hope is dangerous.  A spark is fine, as long as it is contained.  So, contain it.”

In the Christian version of this story, we, too, have become willing participants of our own demise, who must grovel before a devious God and play his games if we hope to be rewarded, if we hope to even survive.  And many’s the person who has seen the Christian story this way.  In this telling of it, we humans have been messing around in God’s games and spoiled the fun for him, and so he introduces a new character: his Son, as a sort of trump card in the game of life to ensure that his will prevails, that God wins in the end.

This version of salvation reminds me of the ironic slogan of the Hunger Games: “May the odds be ever in your favor,” which is ironic because the odds never could be in your favor, and in fact the game is rigged so that the rulers can always get what they want: the sacrifice of the tributes.  So, too, in the perverse telling of the story of salvation in which God demands a tribute for the ancient memory of original sin.  The game is rigged.  Jesus can only ever go to the Cross, and you and I can only ever be guilty for it, more or less the same way we bear the stain of guilt for Adam’s sin.  This is a desolate arena in which to live our lives, and a picture of a God I don’t much want to worship.

It would be better if we could imagine ourselves as 12 year old children this morning.  And it might be helpful if we could acknowledge that the games we play – much to our own detriment – are games of our own making.

It’s us who allow our neighbors to starve, or to sleep in the cold, not God, who has given us everything we need to clothe and feed and shelter the world. 

It’s us who have so perfected the art of war that we simply can’t resist doing a better job of it, looking for places to practice it, and people to practice it on.

It’s us who remember we once heard the phrase “an eye for an eye,” but forget that we heard it when the Teacher was telling us what a stupid way to live that is, so we cling to vengeance all the same.

It’s us who pretend that the poor are poor because of their own fault, and that we are rich because of our virtues, even though we know this is not true.

It’s us who would rather go to brunch on Sunday than to spend an hour in the worship of the Almighty.

It’s us who have exchanged a golden calf for the cash that it would cost to buy one, and who kneel before the altar of our money day in and day out, obsessing about it, dreaming about it, hoarding it if we can, like nothing else.

These are our games, not God’s.  We made up these rules, and we have perfected the ways we live by them – and we have been doing it for thousands of years.  God hasn’t placed us in a cruel arena to fight to the death – we have chosen to live this way.  Even when Paradise was no longer an option, God sent us out into this amazing, beautiful, and sacred globe, where everything we need can be found, and then some, even if we do have to work for it.

We have devised the games that upset our lives.  Cain raised his arm against Abel without any prompting whatsoever from God, and the games began.  If the odds were not in our favor, it’s because we devised games with very bad odds – people still play roulette every day in Las Vegas, after all.  And so as we live our lives, it remains to be seen what these games we play will do to us.  Will we be changed into some kind of monsters that we were not made to be?  Or will we be the people God made us to be?  Will we play along in the Hunger Games, or will we search for a different way?

When we are tempted to see God as the perverse and awful power that demands the sacrifice of blood in exchange for our sins, then we are projecting an ugly image of ourselves onto God.  And the truth is that he sent his Son into the world to show us a different way.  Even at his most triumphal, at the height of his popularity – on Palm Sunday – Jesus could do no better than to ride into town on the back of a donkey, to be greeted by a meager crowd that had only palm branches to wave, and their own clothes to spread on the path before his way.  This is not the entrance of a majestic lord of the universe; it is the humble beginning of a sad procession to the Cross.  Jesus bears no sword and wields no power.  His crown is not yet woven, but when it is, its thorns will be the first instruments to draw blood from him.  The entry into Jerusalem had been a sign of hope – a spark.  But that spark has been contained.  Victory seems unlikely for him now.

How many ways has your hope been contained in this life?  How many times have the odds been stacked against you?  How often does it seem that you have been sent to an arena to fight for the death – but for what?  For what reason or purpose or cause?  Just because the Powers That Be require it of you?

The powers of this world prefer fear to hope.  Hope is only useful insofar as it can be contained.  Life is like the Mega-Millions jackpot: you have to be in it to win it.  But the odds are profoundly not in your favor, you are virtually certain to lose.  But were you a willing participant anyway?

Into these Hunger Games of life – which you and I cannot ever win, we are sure to die – steps One who can only ever die as himself, who cannot be turned into some kind of monster that he is not, because he is love incarnate.  He is our brother, our sister, our friend.  He heard your name called, and mine, at the hour that a ransom of death was being called for, and he stepped in to volunteer: to take our place in the Games that death would like to play with us: games whose rules he knows better than we do, even though we made them up as we went along.

For reasons too mysterious for me to understand, the Hunger Games have not ended, even though he has come into the world and offered himself as a sacrifice for the whole world.  Perhaps the Games have not ended because he still has a lesson to teach us while we live: he still calls us to learn to love one another, to see how futile is the fight to the death, and how holy is the life of love.

Why do you think we tell this story of a man who dies on a Cross, bearing pain the way we do, every bit as human as you and me, but who we know to be the Son of God?  Why do we tell it year after year, and remember the details, and sing about it the way we do?  Why do you think we have carved the image of this scene in every conceivable way: hoisting it high above our heads like some gruesome symbol of some awful, bloody games?

Hope.  Hope is the reason.  Because hope is the only thing stronger than fear.

A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous.

And this hope, that hangs from a Cross, that proclaims with every drop of blood that spills from it, “I love you;” this hope is dangerous because it casts out fear and makes room for love.

And do you know that though many have tried to suppress it, this hope cannot be contained; it cannot be stopped, it cannot be killed, it cannot be turned into some kind of monster that it is not.

This hope volunteers to save your life and mine.  This hope promises that the Games we seem to play, in which the odds are stacked against us, will not end the way it seems they must.

This hope knows our hunger, and fills us with love.

It’s been a good few years since the swallows that used to dependably stop at Mission San Juan Capistrano actually showed up in significant numbers.  Some people think it’s spreading suburban development that’s kept the birds away as they make their annual migration.  Who knows?

Here in Philadelphia we have our own mysterious swallows to contend with, but their story is sort of the reverse image of the romantic pattern of the swallows who would swoop into the picturesque adobe Spanish mission church in Orange County the same week of every year and then wing their way south on their continuing annual pilgrimage.  In our case, we have swallows, the Philadelphia Inquirer tells us, who have moved in for good, giving up their migratory habits in favor of Philly real estate.  But they have not chosen a picturesque site, a place of beauty, or of spiritual significance.  No, these swallows have made their home in a sewage treatment plant in Northeast Philadelphia, which they have decided is a pleasant enough home year ‘round to break them of their snowbird pattern, and so they stay put there all year long, in increasing numbers.  The Northern Rough-winged Swallows are supposed to migrate south for the winter to the Gulf states or as far as Central America.  They forage on the wing, as the birders say, usually flying low, snatching insects in mid-air as they zoom along.  And the allures of a Philadelphia sewage treatment plant have apparently proved to be so thoroughly delightful, that the birds will not budge, even though they ought to be hard-wired to move south for the winter.  Such are the mysteries of nature.

Who can say whether or not God created humans to be migratory creatures?  I suppose I have heard somewhere of long-ago ancestors who led nomadic lives following food – be it herds of animals or the availability of nuts and berries.  But the story of human spirituality is certainly a story of migration to and from the heart of God.  Gestated in the divine womb, and incubated in Paradise, the very next chapter of the human story tells of our migration to other climes of self-assertion that we thought would suit us better, where we supposed we could escape our newly discovered shame, and make good on our own.

On the contrary, we quickly learned to slaughter one another: brother lifting up his hand against his own brother to take his life – which he knew had been given to him by God.  The story that the Scriptures tell traces such prodigal migrations away from God, followed by regular pleading returns when things go badly and the sweat of our brows reminds us that once all was beauty and ease.

By the time God sent his Son, the Beloved, in whom he was well pleased, to live and work and teach among us, even he would migrate for a season into the wilderness to be tempted – as though he was only one of us, just another migratory bird on an annual journey that would bring him safely home.  But, of course, his unique migration pattern is a story that unfolds in the weeks to come.

Suffice it to say that, spiritually speaking, we humans are migratory creatures – we have lived out a pattern of rejection of and return to God: fleeing away, and then flying home when the weather gets cold, the going gets tough, or our shame is more than we can bear.

The ancient rabbis knew why we lived our lives this way: we are sinners, prone to wander, prone to indulge ourselves with things that are not good for us, prone to take what is not ours to take, prone to assert our power just because we can and not because it is right to do so, prone to spill blood as though it was ours to spill, as though God had not measured out every teaspoon of it in our veins with care when he made us, as though he had not aerated that blood with his own breath, and prone to worship other gods – especially those mode from gold.

Your sins and mine may be less colorful, less drastic, less imaginative, but they are no less real, no less selfish, no less insulting to the true and living God.  Do you need me to suggest what yours might be?  Do you need me to air mine, still in need of yet another cycle in the washer, in front of you in order to get the point?  Do you need me to show the other gods you and I have worshiped, do you need me to measure out the gold that tempts us, and count is hefty weight?  Can’t you think of what you’ve done that you ought not to have done, and what you’ve left undone that you ought to have done?  If you can’t, see me later; I may be able to help jog your memory.

But some homing mechanism in our souls is meant to draw us back, when we remember our sins; to bring us home to God when we hear the frost melting to the north and imagine the cool breezes that await us there, and remember how we can cavort on the wing when we are free from these burdens of our own making.  God does not mind that we have made this journey over and over; it is the consequence of our choices, the result of living east of Eden, and he knows us for what we are, for who we are.  And if a soul must migrate for its own well-being, then so be it.  Consider the swallows, how they peregrinate, returning again and again to their places of refreshment.  Except, of course, these days in Philadelphia.  Where the swallows have preferred to stay put in the sewage treatment plant, where, it would seem, they can find everything they need.

And what about you and me?  Have we given up on migrating to and from the heart of God?  Have we found it tiresome to make the journey year by year that requires us - at least for forty days and forty nights - to try to find a minute or two in all these hours to acknowledge our sins, to see our wretchedness, to call ourselves miserable, to know how we offend?

I suppose the swallows who have moved permanently into the sewage treatment plant have gotten used to the stench, or at least they can blame the foul odor on the trash heap, and pretend that none of it comes from them.  How dare we suggest that the foul odor comes from ‘neath their rough feathers!

I don’t know if it’s good for the swallows or not to have given up their migratory life; I have no idea.  But I suspect that we - if we begin to live like these swallows, and give up on our migration to and from the heart of God - I suspect that we pay a price for it, as we begin to think that it’s perfectly alright to live in the sewage, as though God had never meant us for Paradise.  And I think this is what we risk if we make light of Lent, which is meant to be a season of migration back to God, knowing that we are prone to wander away from God.

So many of us have decided to just stay where we are.  We have built mansions for ourselves in the sewage plant and invested heavily in Glade products, because, actually, they do a reasonable job of masking the odor.  But Lent comes to tug at some ancient string of our hearts that wants to take wing so we can find our way out of the sewage and back to God.  Lent comes to remind us that although the way was hard and long, it is invigorating to remember how far we could fly.

This is what we call repentance: being honest about our sins, stopping long enough to realize that too often we have chosen the trash heap, and sometimes it seems as though we have decided to live there permanently.

We don’t come here at the beginning of Lent to make ourselves miserable; we come here because in our selfishness, we have actually already done that.  But eventually the Glade wears off, and we begin to notice a funny smell, as we take account of ourselves and the lives we have chosen.   And even though we have become fat on the insects that thrive amongst the sewage, we begin to remember the view from above, and the way the coastline passed beneath us as we made our way home in the old days of our migration.  And we hear a voice calling us to come home, come home.

And we wonder if the burden of our choices – the burden of our sins – has become too much for us to carry all that way.  But we realize that there is no harm in trying, that there is nothing keeping us here in the sewage treatment plant except our own stubbornness – what the Scriptures call being stiff-necked.

And we stop to say a prayer that might be only one word long – Sorry – but which seems like it needs repeating over and over again.

And we find that far from leaving us out of breath, we are strengthened now, and ready to lean into the breeze that is already lifting us up, and to take to the wing, and to fly, God being our helper, our pardoner, our Salvation, and our true home.

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 February 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia