Saint Mark's Church

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When I was a very little girl, my parents bought me a Cinderella costume for Halloween. I loved Cinderella; she was (and still is) my favorite Disney princess. I remember sitting and staring at the picture on the box – Cinderella on the night of the ball, standing in a shimmering silvery-blue gown with satin opera gloves, her hair swept up in an elegant twist and held in place with a wide black ribbon. I couldn’t wait to slide those long gloves up over my elbows and to feel the swing of that wondrously full, silky-smooth skirt. I can remember wondering how this box was going to help my hair to look like that, but I was sure that once it was opened, all would be made clear.

But this was the 1970’s, and if you were around in the 70’s, you know what’s coming next. When I opened the box, I found not a beautiful ball gown with reams of luxurious fabric – I found a plastic sheath with a picture of Cinderella printed on the front. And there was no stylish Cinderella up-do – there was a plastic mask with a black band and yellow hair painted on the top. You know those masks – the ones with the elastic band that always snapped and popped you in the ear, the masks that made it hard to breathe and made your face so hot you had to take them off halfway through your trick-or-treating. So, sadly, I was not the picture of elegance I had hoped to be that year; I just walked around in my plastic tube, my face red and sweaty behind that smiling Cinderella mask.

This, of course, is the time of year for masks of all kinds. Some of them are bejeweled and beautiful, some of them are gritty and realistic, but most of them are just frightening. My silly plastic Cinderella face notwithstanding, most Halloween masks are intended to scare the pants off of our friends and neighbors. Certainly the most famous Halloween masks are the most terrifying ones – the melting spectre masks from the movie Scream, the ghostly white guise of Michael Myers, Jason’s hockey mask, even the sinister smile of Guy Fawkes in V for Vendetta. And then, of course, there is the most disturbing of all mask scenes, from the latest Batman movie, when the late Heath Ledger as the Joker takes off his creepy clown mask to reveal…his own creepy clown face. In his case, the mask didn’t conceal anything, except for the fact that the dark mask and the dark face were exactly the same.

I wonder if you noticed the dark masks in today’s Gospel reading.  They aren’t the masks of monsters or villains, but they are menacing all the same. They are easier to spot in the verses that immediately follow today’s reading, where Jesus proclaims woe to the Pharisees, woe to those who do not do as they say, woe to the hypocrites. Here are the dark masks, the masks of the hypocrites. The Greek word hypocrite that Jesus speaks here was a term used primarily to describe masked stage actors; it comes from two Greek roots that together mean, essentially, under-distinguished or less-than-sorted. A hypocrite was one whose identity was difficult to distinguish because of intentional deception. In the case of these ancient Greek actors, of course, the deception was harmless, a part of the evening’s entertainment, and the more complete the deception, the better.

But the Pharisees’ deception is different; the Pharisees’ masks are real trickery, hidden and harmful. Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites because while they say the right things, they do not do the right things. They do not act as they teach; they do not practice what they preach. They may preach the good news of binding up the brokenhearted and proclaiming liberty to the captives, but then they “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear” and lay the bruising weight of an over-scrupulous legalism upon the shoulders of their followers. They may teach that the law of the Lord is one that is written in the heart, but then they make the fringes of their prayer shawls long and their prayer ostentatious. And the Pharisees may say, “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God,” but then they walk right up to the head of the table, to the seats of honor in the synagogue, trying to draw as many admiring looks as possible along the way. They say one thing and do another; they are hypocrites. They wear the mask of piety, the mask of humility, the mask of faithful, God-loving, commandment-following Jews, but under that mask their faces are red and sweating with the effort of trying to inhale as much stuff, as many accolades, as they possibly can. They wear masks as they preach the word of God, which is truly terrifying.

What is even more terrifying is the thought that we might do the same thing. There is, as I’m sure you know, ample evidence that the world out there thinks that this is exactly what we Christians do. For example, in 2007, the Barna group conducted a survey of young people, aged 16–29, about their perceptions of Christianity in America. The results were staggering. Within the portion of the survey group who self-identified as non-Christian, 85% stated that they perceived Christians as being fundamentally hypocritical. 85%. Well, but those are non-Christians, we say, the number must be different among believers. It is, it’s lower – only 50%. So 85% of young people who aren’t Christian think we’re hypocrites, and fully half of young people who are Christian still think we’re hypocrites…and I know that this survey is four years old, and I know that survey data can be manipulated, but look around you. There are thousands of 16-29 year-olds in Philadelphia. Where are they? Some of you are here, and I thank God for you as I do for all of you Gen-Xers and Boomers and others. But there is space in our pews, there is room in our budget for more Christians here; we need people from all of these generations at St. Mark’s as much as they need the Gospel that we proclaim. But if this survey is even close in showing us the depth of the world’s spiritual malaise and cynicism about Christianity, how do we convince that world that we’re for real? If those who are not here yet see us as hypocrites, if all that they see are masks, how do we show them who we really are?

I think that there is only really one way to do this, and it isn’t to try to convince them – or, frankly, to convince ourselves – that we don’t have masks on at all. I don’t think it does much good to say to those who are not here yet, “Hey, come on in, we look exactly like you!” Because we don’t. I mean, look at us. We wear instruments of Roman torture around our necks, we kneel and bow and genuflect and sing in a culture that sees none of that as particularly normal, we appear to the world as a community shaped not by what we know or how much we have but by who we love. Some of us even wear long fringes. We do not look like the world. We do wear a kind of mask, we do put on a Christian identity here in our liturgy, in our prayers, when we recite the creeds, when we renew our baptismal vows, when we take, eat and drink this all of you. But these are not the dark masks of the hypocrite. They are not masks intended to deceive or to conceal.  Because unlike the Pharisees, we not only look different, we are different. What we have to do, what we must do, is show the world that our masks and our faces look exactly the same.

So then here is the question for Saint Mark’s today – if we were to take off our masks, what would we look like underneath? For example, if we were to take off the bejeweled, beautiful mask of our liturgy, would we still look the same? When we leave this sacred space, do we carry with us a deep honor and reverence for the stuff of the world around us, do we still bow our heads before the holy in our ordinary and genuflect before Christ in each other? Or if we were to take off the gritty, realistic mask of our service in this place and around the world, would we still look the same? When we leave the soup bowl or the food cupboard or St. James the Less, do we still live generously in the rest of our lives, giving of our time, our money, our prayers – are we still dedicated to the kind of concern and advocacy for those who carry heavy burdens in this world? Beneath the masks of our liturgy, our service, our prayer, our adoration, our giving, our learning, do we look the same? Do we let these faces of Christianity shape what we look like on the inside?

This is our labor and toil, brothers and sisters – this is our ministry – to let the masks of our faith so shape who we are within that we can live a life worthy of God, and represent Christ to the world. This is what will bring those who are searching for God through our doors; this is what Christ passionately desires of us – that we go and do as we say here, that we go and practice what we preach here, that our faces shine with the same light of truth that is engraved upon our hearts.  It is, of course, only by the gift of God that we can do this, and so we pray in the words of our last hymn that Christ will “make thy Church, dear Savior, a lamp of purest gold, to bear before the nations thy true light as of old; O teach thy wandering pilgrims by this their path to trace, till, clouds and darkness ended, they see thee face to face.”

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

30 October 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re a Pharisee. You probably don’t want to imagine that you’re a Pharisee; you’d probably rather imagine that you’re St. Peter or the Centurion or Spartacus – but humor me for a moment.  You’re a Pharisee.  You are a lay leader in your religious community. You love the Torah and the beautiful logic of the law that it lays down for you.  You live a simple life; you tithe, faithfully observe the Sabbath, try to keep your body and soul pure and holy.  You hold yourself apart from the temple priests and the Sadducees, partially because you disagree with them on practices and doctrine, but mostly because you like to hold yourself apart.  You see it as your task, your calling, to lead your community into a new understanding of themselves as faithful, practicing, holy Jews. You teach and preach and live a life of righteousness under the law.

Into your life comes a man named Jesus. You first heard about him from John the Baptist, that desert zealot who kept calling you and your friends a brood of vipers. At first, you liked Jesus a lot – certainly more than his hairy, locust-eating cousin. Jesus said some good things, and he at least he wasn’t calling you names. He spoke about fulfilling the law, about ushering in the kingdom of God; he taught and healed and preached just like you wanted to. But then you began to notice that he didn’t always act just like you wanted to. He and his disciples didn’t follow every single letter of the law, especially about Sabbath practices. He liked to hang out with a rather unseemly crowd and let scandalous women weep all over his feet. You yourself asked Jesus for a sign, and he refused you.  And just this past week, after he rode into Jerusalem with fanatics screaming Hosanna and strewing palm fronds at his feet, he stormed into the temple and made a royal mess of the money changing tables and told parable after parable about how you and your Pharisee friends – fellow reformers, mind you – are about to have the kingdom taken away from you because he thinks you wear the false masks of hypocrites. He’s even started calling you – guess what? – a brood of vipers.

And so one day you look at your own reflection in the waters of the mikvah and you say enough is enough; no more following him around asking stupid questions and hoping that he’ll say what you want him to. It’s time to take action, time to out this Jesus as the heretic he is, to show the people that he is not their Messiah. It’s time to get him in some serious trouble. But you can’t really do this on your own. After all, you’ve a righteous, law-abiding guy; you need help from some tougher players. So you look over your shoulder, cross the tracks, and knock on the door of the local Herodian gang. Now the Herodians are not fans of yours – they’re establishment guys, fans of Rome, power players in the political scene. They may not particularly like you, but they really don’t like Jesus, and they’re happy to help you set him up.

And so you all put your heads together and whip up the perfect impossible situation. You’re going to ask Jesus whether or not you should pay the census tax, a tax mercilessly imposed by Rome, a tax that the Israelites absolutely hate. If he says yes, the Israelites will hate him too; if he says no, he sets himself up directly as a dangerous enemy of the Roman state. Either way, you win. And just to add to the pressure, you’re going to ask him this question together – you, the Pharisee, who despises the census tax, and your new allies, the Herodians, who want nothing more than to continue to placate the Roman authorities who are the primary source of their power. And you’re going to pose this question right in the temple, right in front of God and everybody. Your plan is to flatter him a bit, soften him up, and then spring the trap and watch him squirm.

And so imagine that you, the Pharisee, meet up with Jesus on the temple mount. “O great and powerful Rabbi, answer a simple question for us – do you think we should pay this tax to Caesar, or not?” And you sit back and wait for the squirming to begin. You wait for Jesus to start shuffling his feet and writing in the dirt and avoiding your eye like a bad student who didn’t memorize his Torah portion for the day. You begin to imagine his disgrace, his downfall, you can almost see his disciples turning and walking away, his followers turning to you, giving themselves over to following the law as you see it, worshipping God as you think they should, listening to you.

But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t squirm at all. He looks you right in the eye and calls you out. “Why are you trying to set me up? I see that mask you have on, you know. Show me the coin, and I’ll tell you what to do with it.” And without thinking you reach deep into your pocket, and pull out a small silver denarius – and you look at this coin, with its image of Caesar’s arrogant, self-righteous head, with its inscription that celebrates his power and even his divinity – and you suddenly realize where you are. You’re standing on the temple mount, holding an idolatrous, sacrilegious piece of mammon in your sweaty hands. You hear Jesus’ voice like it’s coming from very far away, “Let Caesar have his own stupid coin; but give God, whose most holy place you are standing in right now, all of the things that are His.” And you, the righteous Pharisee, can’t quite believe what it is that you’re doing. You’re standing there aligned with people you don’t like, hearing words that you already know are true, words that you should be telling the people yourself. And you’re stuck holding this stupid coin, trapped and squirming.

And the moral of the story is…? It could be: don’t try to set up Jesus. This is never a particularly good idea. But it could also be this: you can tell a lot about a person by what she carries around in her pockets. These Pharisees had gotten themselves so tied up in knots by their own fear and condemnation, so disconnected from the holiness of their calling, that they were walking around with the desolating sacrilege in their pockets without even realizing it. They were carrying around an image of worldly concerns, of mortal power, the very power that they were seeking for themselves even as they condemned it with their words and overly-scrupulous actions. They had somehow bought Rome’s argument – that you needed this coin to be safe and successful in the world – and so they had actually answered their own question. Should we pay taxes to Rome? I guess so, if you can’t even leave the house without Rome right there in your pocket.

A wise man once said that you can tell what kind of discipleship a person is living by looking at his checkbook. But since no one uses checks anymore, I think we could update that saying to this: you can tell a lot about a person by what he carries around in his wallet.  And yes, I do mean literally. What you have in your pocket right now says something about you. Your keys – how many, and to what? Your smartphone, your wallet, with how many credit cards? Membership cards, pictures of your family. Cash. Bus tokens. A clip of your beloved’s hair. A hand-written prayer. A cross. An icon. A pledge card. A mint. Some of the stuff in our pockets might be just fine – good and meet and right so to have. But some of it might be like that damning denarius. Some of the things that we carry around with us in our pockets – literal or metaphorical – might just cause us to shuffle around a bit if we had to pull them out here in this holiest of houses, in front of God and everybody.

Now as squirmy as all of this might make us, there is some good news here.  We aren’t alone in all of this. It seems to be a part of the human condition to collect junk in our pockets like so many bad apps on our iPhones. And Jesus doesn’t condemn us for it – he didn’t condemn the Pharisee for it, and he doesn’t condemn us. He just asks us to figure out what to do with all of it. He asks us to take it out, look at it, evaluate it, and decide if it’s something that belongs to the world or something that belongs to God.  Is it something we offer as a grateful gift to God, or is it something that we just need to get out of our pockets because it probably isn’t very good for us anyway? The trouble is that Jesus didn’t really say how to do that, how to categorize these things, our stuff. And whether you are a part of the richest of the rich 1% or the rest of us 99%, figuring this out is a real challenge. Which things are Caesar’s? Which things are God’s? The truth is that Jesus isn’t willing to give us a hard and fast rule about how we decide which is which. He is, after all, not a Pharisee. He is Jesus, the Christ, the fulfillment of the living law, and he is not willing to be trapped by our own anxieties and insecurities. But he is willing to stand with us, to look at each and every thing that we pull out of our pocket, to help us decide where it belongs – what we are to do with it, how it fits into our lives as disciples. So go ahead, take a look. What’s in your wallet? And what does that say about you? And, more importantly, what are you going to say about it?

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

16 October 2011

St. Mark's, Philadelphia

Three little words.  They are spoken in moments when our emotions run high, when our hearts race and our stomachs clench tight and our cheeks are flushed pink.  Three little words.  They often sort of spill out of our mouths in a rush, popping out when we least expect them.  Sometimes we whisper them; sometimes we mumble them.  They often sound breathy, or overly loud or…whiny.  That’s right: whiny.  Because I’m not talking about those three little words – not “I love you” – I’m talking about the other favorite three word combination in the English language: it’s not fair.

I don’t know why we humans always seem to look for the world to be fair.  I don’t know if this is something we learn in childhood, or if we actually come out of the womb looking for the tallies to be even on either side of life’s ledger.  I don’t know if the alarm that goes off in our minds when we see the scales tilted towards one side or the other (an alarm that goes off with the most enthusiasm whenever those scales seems to be tilted away from us) – I don’t know if that alarm is genetic or simply handed down by our parents.  Maybe the eternal quest to find fair is simply an American thing.  I just don’t know.  What I do know is that the search for fair – and the crying and whining when we discover something that is not fair – begins at a very early age, and it lurks around the edges of our personalities through all of the stages of our lives.  It’s not fair: Billy got two blue m-n-m’s, and I only got one.  It’s not fair: Anjel got first seat in the trumpet section and he doesn’t practice nearly as much as I do.  It’s not fair: Julia’s mom says that she can stay out until 1:00 instead of 12:30.  It’s not fair: I’ve worked really hard in school but my parents can’t afford to send me to college.  It’s not fair: all of my friends are married by now.  It’s not fair: my sister can’t get pregnant when I have five children.  It’s not fair: I’ve been loyal to this company through all of the takeover transition and I’m the one who’s losing my job. It’s not fair: I’ve never smoked a day in my life, and I’m the one who ends up with lung cancer.  It’s not fair: you don’t love me the way that I love you.  It’s not fair: I’ve lived a good life, loved long and hard, and now I end up alone and unvisited in a nursing home where no one seems to know my name.

Now sometimes when we say, “It’s not fair,” it means that there’s something in the world that needs to be changed.  And so we go about trying to change it: we write “when in the course of human events” and “[bring] forth upon this continent a new nation,” we publish abolitionist newspapers and shepherd slaves on the Underground Railroad, we protest about women’s abolition outside the White House until we are thrown in prison, we board a bus with both white and black students and ride to Mississippi.  Sometimes we see the scales of justice tipped so badly to one side or the other that we have to – we simply must – stand up and start pushing them back into place.  We cook soup and feed it to all takers on Saturday morning; we travel to Honduras with approximately 8 tons of medication and even more love and care; we unlock the gate on a school in West Allegheny. 

But most of the time, most of the time, when we say, “It’s not fair,” it doesn’t have to do with questions of true justice; we simply mean that it’s not going our way, that our life isn’t the way we envisioned it, that our expectations of the universe aren’t being met.  It’s not fair.  And what is it that our moms and our best friends and our work colleagues always say back to us?  What is that phrase?  Oh, yes.  Life isn’t fair.  That’s right.  Life isn’t fair.  Don’t expect things always to go your way.  Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.  Sometimes you get the short end of the stick.  Because mostly, life doesn’t turn out like you expect it to; it isn’t fair, and it’s often not nearly as good as you’d hoped.  These aren’t exactly comfortable words, but they’re intended to help us toughen up, adjust our hopes and dreams, and live in the real world.

Well, we have got two classic cases of “It’s not fair” whining in our readings this morning.  First we have Jonah, this unlikely and unwilling prophet, who has finally spoken his word of warning to the people of Nineveh.  And – lo and behold – they actually listened.  They changed their evil ways, dressed themselves (and their animals) in ash and sackcloth and repented and returned to the Lord.  And so – lo and behold – the Lord actually pardons them.  And that’s when Jonah starts up with the whining.  I knew this is what was going to happen; I never really liked these Ninevites anyway and then you made me come preach to them and because of me they decide to try to be good Jews for a second and a half…and you go and forgive them.  It’s not fair!  I’ve been living the hard life of the Torah for ever, and they put some soot on their goats’ heads and you decide to pardon the whole lot.  I’m just going to go sit by myself in the corner and sulk, because you are so not fair!!  

Compare that classic whining to the whining of the early workers in today’s parable from Matthew.  These are the people who were recruited by the landowner to come work in his vineyard very first thing in the morning.  The landowner promised to pay them a good day’s wage, and so they’ve worked hard, all day, sweating in the sun, pushing through the after-lunch drowsies, hour after hour until all the work is done.  When evening comes, they go to the landowner’s manager to get their pay.  But then, wait a minute – they’re told to get at the back of the line.  They have to wait while all of the people who worked less than they did (some a lot less than they did) get their pay.  Well, that’s not fair, they should have been paid first!  But then they see that the people who worked only an hour or so got paid a full day’s wage; so they start to think that they must be getting some kind of special vineyard-laborer-of-the-week bonus.  But when they get to the head of the line, they are paid exactly what the landowner said he was going to pay them, exactly the same as the slackers who didn’t start work until 5 pm.  One day’s wage.  It’s not fair, the early workers say, those guys over there got paid the same as we did, when they spent most of the day loitering in the Wawa parking lot and we’re going home with farmer’s tans and palms full of calluses.  Not fair!

Now what’s really interesting is how the Jonah’s Lord God and Matthew’s Lord Landowner respond to these whiners.  They say essentially the same thing – the same thing that our parents and friends have been telling us for years.  You think I’m not being fair?  Guess what.  Life’s not fair.  Don’t always expect life to go the way you’re expecting it to go.  Life isn’t balanced; life isn’t fair.  Sometimes you win and sometimes I help other people to win too.  Sometimes you get the prize and sometimes I give the prize to a whole lot of other people too.  Life isn’t always what you expect it to be: sometimes it’s a whole lot better than you’d hoped. 

Life isn’t fair.  And in the sinful, human world that we live in, this usually means that hearts will be broken.  In this world, “life isn’t fair” usually means that there isn’t enough for everyone and that we need to compete for everything we have – jobs, love, security, peace, family.  But Jonah and Matthew remind us that we don’t live in just this world.  We also live in the kingdom of God, here and now.  And if we are able to see into that kingdom, and, as today’s collect says, to hold fast those things that shall endure even as we sit here among things that are passing away, how much easier we can be.  If we plant our expectation and hope in those things heavenly, how much less anxious we can be about earthly things, for in the kingdom of God, all of their brutal power fades away.  Because in that heavenly kingdom, life, true life, the life given to us by God and redeemed by His only Son, is absolutely not fair.  In that kingdom, we all get far better than we deserve.  We get the gifts of God’s love even when we don’t love Him back.  We get God’s forgiveness even when we sin repeatedly and terrifically.  We get the inspiration of the Holy Spirit even when we aren’t really looking for it; we get the gifts of bread and wine even when we have little faith. 

And all we have to do to receive these radical, life-changing, unfair gifts is to accept that God gives them to everyone else too – to admit that we are all made equal by God’s infinite blessings.  And so if we want to receive God’s forgiveness, we have to accept that God is also forgiving corporate CEO’s who are living high on the hog while their companies lay off more and more people.  If we want to receive God’s inspiration, we have to accept that God is helping other people’s creativity too.  If we want to receive God’s love and healing, we have to accept that God is loving and healing those people we most dislike too.  All we have to do is to accept that God will do with God’s Grace and God’s Love and God’s Mercy and God’s Patience whatever God wants to do, which is always to give generously.  To you.  And to me.  And to everybody else.  And that just isn’t fair.  Thanks be to God. 

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

18 September 2011

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia         

In 1979, the National Hurricane Center developed a system of naming hurricanes that continues to this day.  The Worldwide Tropical Cyclone Name List, now managed by the World Meteorological Organization, is a series of six cycles of alternating men’s and women’s names, listed in alphabetical order from A–W (skipping the letter Q, thankfully).  If a storm is particularly destructive, its name is retired from the list, and another name replaces it.  Otherwise, the names continue to cycle in and out every six years.  I’m not sure what it means that, in a cycle of only 126 names – some of which are quite unusual, like Joaquin, Sebastien with an “e,” and Cristobal – that both Sean and Erika (yes, spelled with a “k”) are included in the current six-year cycle.  Sean is the “s” hurricane name for this year, actually, and Erika will cycle around again in 2015.  Nice to know that the St. Mark’s clergy are well represented in the world of hurricane nomenclature. 

Hurricanes had names before 1979, too, but the systems for creating those names varied.  Before then, North American hurricanes were given only women’s names.  (So glad they adjusted that!)  And prior to 1953, hurricanes were given names based on the phonetic alphabet or even by the saints’ day that fell closest to the storm.  But no matter the system, people have always made an effort to identify these storms by name rather than just by coordinates on a map.  Part of this, of course, is that names are a lot easier to communicate than longitude and latitude, particularly if there is more than one storm at a time, but I imagine that there is another reason for this practice as well.  Naming storms makes them seem a little more human and therefore just a bit more understandable.  If we call a storm by a human name – Irene, say – then suddenly “she” can have feelings, she can “rage” and “unleash her fury,” and as terrifying as this rage and fury might be, at least it’s something we’ve seen before, something we’ve had some practice responding to.  But imagine that this was Storm 9 blowing around outside; then suddenly we are surrounded by a powerful atmospheric disturbance – something impersonal, other, soulless, and that is terrifying in a completely different way.  As strange as it may seem, these names can help us to get a handle on things, to fit these storms into our understanding of the world, perhaps even to imagine that we can somehow control them, or at least control our response to them.  

“Then Moses said to God, ‘Suppose I go to the People of Israel and I tell them, “The God of your fathers sent me to you”; and they ask me, “What is his name?”  What do I tell them?’”  Here we have Moses – he has come to the backside of the wilderness, followed the beacon of the burning bush to the Holy Ground where God abides, heard the voice of God calling his name, and been told that he is in the presence of “the God of [his] father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”  He seems to have been thoroughly introduced.  He knows who it is that he is talking with – knows it so acutely that he hides his face in terror.

And yet when God charges Moses to go into Egypt to collect His people from Pharaoh, Moses feels the need to ask for further clarification, further identification.  Who am I, he asks again, who am I that you want me to go into Egypt?  You are the one who goes with me, God responds.  And what if the Hebrews want to know who you are? Moses asks.  I know that we just met, but could you tell me your name again?  What is it that Moses is up to here?  Why does he need more than the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs, the God of the entire arc of Israel’s history?  What is the name that he is looking for? 

The honest answer is that we’ll never really know.  All that we can really know is that Moses is clearly trying to get out of his assignment.  Perhaps he is just trying to prolong the conversation, put off the inevitable journey ahead of him.  Perhaps he asks for God’s name because he’s afraid the Hebrew people will laugh at him when he arrives in Egypt.  Perhaps he secretly hopes that God will refuse to give him His name, thus creating the perfect excuse for Moses to bow out of God’s plans.  Or perhaps Moses is seeking God’s name because he hopes that knowing the proper name of Almighty God will afford him some control over the situation, give him some power that he clearly does not already have.  After all, in ancient mythology, knowing someone’s proper name often means that you can claim a kind of authority over them.  If you know the true name of a god or of a supernatural being, you can influence them, call upon them to act on your behalf, exert your control over their powers.  Perhaps Moses really was that scared – and looking to name God in an attempt to get a handle on the situation, to gain some kind of control.

Whatever his reasons for asking for God’s name, Moses could have never anticipated the answer he would get.  For God spoke to Moses this name, these holy, mysterious sounds, syllables that are so enigmatic that even today we aren’t entirely sure how to translate them.  I AM WHO I AM, we sometimes say, or I will be what I will be, I am He-Who-Is, or I am being-there.  The mysterious, powerful name of God whispers of the very depths of being itself; it refuses to be controlled or defined; even when shared it has such immense reality, such immense true-ness, that it cannot be diminished or mishandled.  This name is very like the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters we sometimes speak as Yahweh, a name that is so revered, so holy, so other that even though it appears over 6500 times in the Hebrew Bible, it was traditionally said aloud only once a year, held on the lips of a high priest in the holy of holies on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year.  The One Who Is is a name that defies description and limitation; it is not a label but a verb.  It is a powerful, terrible, mighty verb, one that reminds Moses – and us – that the one who calls is the very one who called all of heaven and earth into being, the one who continues to breathe life into the cosmos, that continues, always, to be. 

And yet it is The One Who Is who promises to go with Moses to the land of Egypt.  It is The One Who Is who promises to stand with Moses when he tells Pharaoh, Let my people go.  It is The One Who Is who reminds Moses and the Israelites again and again that He is their God – the God of their ancestors, the God of their history, their present, and their future.  This great, mysterious, terrifying Being of Beings is one who chooses to be with His people, for His people, even chooses to be one of His people, to save them and make their state of being holy in his own. 

Like Moses, we are about to embark upon a long, challenging journey.  Like Moses, we have been called by name by God, by The One Who Is, and sent into the world to bring God’s people home.  We sit here at the backside of summer, looking ahead to the program year, at all of the ministries that we are about to undertake in earnest.  And that view, let’s be honest, can be frightening – there is so much need in the world that it swirls about us like the winds of a storm – it can make us want to hide our faces, and ask, Who am I?  Who am I to take on the poverty of Philadelphia?  Who am I to feed the hungry here in Center City, to teach the students in Allegheny West?  Who am I to try to free people from addiction, to care for the dying, to visit the prisoner?  Who am I to travel to the halls of power and speak words of truth there – to say let my people, all of God’s people, be fully free, fully blessed, and fully known?  Who am I?  You are the one, God says, who goes with me.  Say to those people who come here looking for food, rest, forgiveness, and joy, that you are the one who walks with The One Who Is.  You carry with you the power of God’s own Name, because God’s name is a promise – a promise to be with us and for us, in fair and stormy weather, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.  World without end.  Amen.

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

28 August 2011

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The book The Help is the story of a group of white women and their black maids in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi.  The world of The Help is one of rigid roles:  the white women play bridge and organize fundraisers, while their black maids cook their food, clean their houses, and raise their children.  The white women expect the black maids to keep their children clean and well-fed, and above all, out of their hair as they engage with their busy social lives. 

Aibileen is a maid in the house of Elizabeth Leefolt, a woman who finds motherhood completely exasperating.  Her two-year-old daughter, Mae Mobley, exhausts her, bothers her, and so again and again, she passes her off to Aibileen’s care.  It is Aibileen who dresses Mae Mobley, Aibileen who plays with her and answers her questions about the world.  And it is Aibileen who first notices that Mae Mobley is starting to see herself as her mother sees her – as a pest, as something irksome and irritating.  Mae Mobley can only see herself as a “bad girl,” and this, of course, absolutely breaks Aibileen’s heart.  So Aibileen decides to fight back in her own way – by offering Mae Mobley a kind of daily positive affirmation.  Day after day she repeats these words – “You are a pretty girl, a good girl, a kind girl,” willing them to work their way into Mae Mobley’s heart, hoping that she will learn to see herself as beautiful and lovable, no matter what names her mother might call her.

Now this is just one side storyline in the book – and it may not appear in the movie at all, I haven’t seen it yet – but I remember it distinctly because I think it really rings true.  For which one of us hasn’t seen a loved one beaten down and wanted to build them back up?   We all have known people who believe all of the negative things the world tells them about themselves.  We all have known people who have a difficult time seeing themselves as good, as beautiful, as worthy, who far more easily accept the cruel names that others call them.  I would guess that most of us have felt this way ourselves from time to time.  We know what it feels like to believe the worst about ourselves, and we know what it feels like to love people who cannot see all of the beauty that we see in them.  We know what it feels like to have this kind of broken heart. 

I think this must be part of the reason why listening to today’s Gospel is so difficult.  Yes, I would imagine I’m not the only one who squirmed a little while listening to the story of this Canaanite woman.  This story is hard to hear – first of all because this Jesus is difficult to look at.  Not only does he completely ignore the cries of this Gentile woman, but when his disciples finally ask Jesus to do something about her, he tells them, essentially, that he’s off today.  I’m not working up here – this isn’t my district, and these aren’t my people; my only clients are the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  And then, when the woman quite literally throws herself at his feet and begs for his help, he throws a kind of racial slur in her face, the word that Jews sometimes used to describe a lowly Gentile – he calls her a dog. 

Jesus calls her a dog.  Ugh.  That is certainly hard to hear, but it’s also hard to hear about how this woman seems to just sit there and take it.  She just kneels there in the dirt and says Okay, I’m a dog, I’m a bad girl, and it breaks my heart to hear her say this.  Now to be fair, she does use her wits to turn that slur back against Jesus, and we would be right to give her credit for her cleverness.  Right, I’m a dog, she says, but even a lowly, miserable cur like me gets to eat the food that falls to the floor.  Very smart…and effective, because when Jesus hears his own words handed back to him in this slightly different package – the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, like a measure of yeast, like a tiny crumb – it changes him.  He changes his mind, commends her “great faith,” and heals her daughter. 

But to be honest there is a part of me that is less than satisfied with her response, clever as it is.  Part of me wants her to jump to her feet and come right back at him. “Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario?” I want her to ask.  “Yes,” Jesus would reply.  “Who is the dog?”  “You are.”  “I am.  I am the dog.  I am the dog.”  (If you can name that movie to me later, you win a free cookie at coffee hour.)  But seriously, there’s a part of me that wants her to fight back.  I want her to say, “I may be a Gentile, but I’m not a dog.  I am not a bad girl; I am good and kind, I am a beautiful woman who desperately loves her desperately sick daughter, and I am worthy of your love and of your care and of your respect.”  Hah!  I can see her in my mind, standing in Jesus’ face, hands on her hips, eyes flashing like fire.        

But the Canaanite woman does not do this; instead she chooses to sit in the dust at Jesus’ feet and in her role as a less-than, as an other, as a dog.  How can we understand her actions?  Are they only a ploy to manipulate Jesus or does she really feel this way about herself?   And if she is just being clever, then where is the “great faith” in that?  No – the key to her great faith is found earlier in the reading, all the way back at the beginning of the story, in these words: “A Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.’”  The woman calls him Lord, Son of David.  She knows who Jesus is.  She truly sees him, recognizes him as the Messiah.  And so when she sits at his feet and accepts her role, she is not sitting at the feet of a mere man and allowing herself to be humiliated by him; she is sitting at the feet of God, and she allows herself to be humbled before him.  She sits at the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ and says to him, I am not a bad girl, but compared to you, I am, actually utterly unworthy.  Compared to your glory, I am a dog, a flea on a dog’s back.  Compared to you, I am nothing…and yet I still hope for your mercy.  I still am, sitting here, asking you to help me. 

So it is not just her cleverness that helps to change Jesus’ mind; it is also her posture, her humility.  For when Jesus looks down upon her, he sees his own self.  He sees himself, who has “humbled himself and [become] obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”  Yes, Christ knows humility; he knows what it is to know the dust, the humus of our being.  And when he sees this humility mirrored back to him in the great faith of this unlikely woman, it opens his heart in ways even he never could have anticipated.  He starts to see the edges of his mission field expanding; he begins to see this woman as sister and not other.  And the next time he sends out his disciples, he will send them not just to the lost sheep of Israel, but to make disciples of all nations.  And all because this one woman was unafraid to be utterly humble. 

Humility is rather undervalued these days.  In times of fear and unrest, it can be a scary thing to be humble – to admit that we might be wrong, that we don’t have all of the answers, that we might need some help, even from God.  Too often, we wrongly equate being humble with being a doormat – with being weak or unsure of ourselves.  In the wider Church, we have downplayed humility for years.  We see so many broken people in our pews and in the world, all of the Mae Mobley’s out there and in here who feel unlovable, who have been called every name in the book because of their race or class or their sexual orientation or how they dress, and it breaks our hearts.  And so sometimes we hesitate to ask ourselves or anyone else to humble themselves before God because we are afraid that it might take away our already fragile sense of dignity.  We try to offer affirmations of our worth without falling on our knees, because to be that humble is just too scary. 

But we at St. Mark’s know – and this Gospel reminds us – that to deny ourselves the experience of humbling ourselves before God is to deny ourselves a great gift.  It is to deny ourselves the chance to discover who we really are and where our dignity really comes from; we are the daughters and sons of God, who are made worthy and made beautiful by an Almighty, All-Loving God.  What a gift this holy, divine affirmation is – that God sees us as we truly are – as imperfect human beings – and chooses to love us anyway.  What grace this is – that God knows us, knows that we are eternally incapable of earning God’s favor, and then pours that favor upon us anyway.  It is only when we find the right role, when we place ourselves in the correct posture, humbly kneeling at the feet of the living Christ, that we can know and honor and love ourselves as beautiful, good, kind, imperfect, wonderfully beloved children of God.  So be not afraid – come, kneel at this table, humble yourself before Him, and be healed. 

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

14 August 2011

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia