Saint Mark's Church

Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.   (2 Cor. 4:3)

The artist Christo is planning to erect a canopy of silvery fabric over a six-mile-long section of the Arkansas River that flows through Bighorn Sheep Canyon in Colorado.  But some local people object to the project, called “Over the River,” because of the amount of construction required to install it.  As you know, Christo is famous for wrapping things in fabric – everything from an island near Miami to a bridge in Paris to the Reichstag in Germany.  In this case, rafters paddling their boats on the river would look up through the translucent fabric, and others would look down at the covered section from vantage points on the canyon slopes above.

What is it about these art installations of Christo’s that is so enthralling?  How is it that covering up an object of beauty and grace, or interrupting it – as was the case with installations like Running Fence in California, or The Gates in Central Park (the only one of Christo’s installations I have seen in person), somehow allows us to experience it in a new way?

Part of the magic of Christo’s art is that he has taken a form – the veil – that is fundamentally about obscuring and made it function in such a way that his veils are fundamentally revealing.  Christo puts a veil between us and the world around us, and we see something we have never seen before, experience something we have never experienced before.  I can tell you that was my experience of The Gates.  I spent part of my childhood going to Central Park nearly every day, and yet when I went there to see The Gates, the Park, and the people in it, were transformed; it was as though it was an almost entirely new park.

In the Scriptures, a veil is almost always deployed to obscure.  A note in my Oxford Annotated Bible for the 3^rd and 4^th verses of the second Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians says this; “Paul has apparently been accused of not making the Gospel clear.”

To defend himself Paul takes up an argument that he might have borrowed from Christo: If my Gospel is veiled, if it seems to be obscured, it only seems so to those who are perishing, to those who are stuck in the old way of seeing, the old way of believing, the old way of living, whose eyes have been blinded by the devil from seeing what lies beyond the veil.  This is a self-serving argument for Paul, but never mind, because the fact of the matter is that the Gospel is often unclear to people in our own day and age.  You might say that the one thing most Christians could agree on is that the Gospel is broadly misunderstood – by other Christians who see it differently than I see it, by non-believers who may barely see it all or see a warped version of it, and by un-believers who delight to call it something that it is not.

Has the Good News of God in Christ been so veiled that it is difficult to see, difficult to hear?  Can we even recognize it for what it is?  Do you, who come to church week by week, know what is the meaning of the Gospel?  Or is there a veil across it that prevents even your hopeful eyes from seeing it for what it is?

What does it mean to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Saviour of the World?  Or is this old question so veiled in mystery and the checkered history of its supposed guardians that it has become hopelessly and irretrievably veiled?

To answer that question, I wish we could all be together on a raft in the Arkansas River.  I wish we could feel the power of the water carrying us along on our journey, and the refreshing splash of its spray, and the interplay of fear and thrill as we are carried over white water.  I wish we could be propelled over churning water with the sense that life is a river, with the fast, cold water below, and the clear, warm sky above us.

Travel even a beautiful river often enough and you will begin to take its beauty and its power and its life for granted – this is the human story.  You will begin to think that life is not about the river and the mysterious and wonderful forces that keep it moving; you will begin to think that life is about you, and you may begin to think, on the one hand, what a terrifically skilled and quite handsome navigator of the river you have become, or on the other hand, what a hopeless and quite ugly traveler of its waters you have become.

And one day you will be gliding along in your raft, or you will be picking your way across the rocks at the bank, and you will slip and fall into the river.

Perhaps there is a waterfall down river from where you have fallen in.  Perhaps you know it; perhaps you don’t.  But the water is cold and moving fast now, and you are not in control, although you are able to stay afloat.  You are struggling to keep your feet downstream, so as to push off any rocks with your legs as you were taught to do the first time you stepped into a raft a long time ago.  The river keeps pushing you around, though, twirling you through the water.  And you are sometimes staring into the dark rush of water, and sometimes watching the steep banks go rushing by, and sometimes gazing up at the clear blue sky above you.  And you are trying to remember if there is a waterfall up ahead, and how far a drop it is, and whether or not you could survive being carried over such falls.  And you are trying to remember whether or not the river slows down between where you are now and where the falls may or may not take you plunging to your death.

You are wondering if there is a tree with a branch hanging low over the river that you could grab onto.  You are trying to figure out if you could get close to the banks to reach up to such a branch if it existed.  And there is the water beneath you, and the steep canyon along side you, and the distant, brilliant blue sky above you, and there seems to be not much else in the world.

And momentarily it occurs to you that you should pray, you should call upon God to save you, because, you have been taught to treat God like an emergency safety device: break glass and pull lever in the event of an emergency.  But you realize that thinking of God in this way has left you almost completely unprepared to pray, and nearly unwilling to rely on the possibility that there is a God and that if there was, he would be interested in plucking you from the water to save you.

Long ago you stopped trying to swim, knowing that it would exhaust you in this fast-moving water.  And the water now seems to be moving faster, and the rocks are bigger and easier to smash into, and, wrack your mind though you may, you cannot remember if there is a big waterfall ahead, you cannot picture it, but you think there must be.  It begins to dawn on you that this journey can only possibly end one way at the bottom of the falls.  So what’s the point in trying to pray now anyway?

The river is moving fiercely now, and you are swallowing water as you flail on your way, and it dawns on you how casually you treated the river all these years – never seeing it as a river that could carry you to life or to death, it was just there.

And as you are beginning to regret how careless you were, and as you are beginning to think that you just have to give yourself over to the river, because the river is in charge, more powerful than you, and a force of nature, after all,  - just then, there comes a wide bend in the river that opens into slower-moving water.  And you find that you are flipped over onto your back, floating head-first downstream (which is dangerous because of the rocks, but you haven’t the strength left to fight it).

And your arms are stretched out on either side of you, your feet pointed upstream, your head is tilted back so you can breathe, and your eyes are open and you can see the clear blue sky, but above you, in between you and the endless sky above, is a canopy of silvery fabric, supported on light steel arms that required, it must be admitted, a lot of construction to get them there.  And you discover that you can float downstream quite safely this way now; the water has slowed.  But you are exhausted and really unable to do anything but be carried along now.

And in the pleats of shiny fabric above you, through which you are watching the sky and the canyon walls slip by, you can see words spelled out.  And this is what they say: “For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

And you reach out your hands toward the shimmering fabric above where the words are already disappearing.  And quite magically the fabric reaches out to enfold you. and collect you from the water, and swaddle you, to dry you, and to warm you, and to lift you out of the water and place your feet safely on dry ground, high enough up on the steep canyon walls to see a waterfall ahead of you, and behind you a long stretch of river with a canopy hanging over it like a veil, which you would think obscures the river, and makes it harder to see for what it is.  But, in fact, you can see that the veil covers precisely that section of the river in which you were saved, and you can tell that it was in the fabric of that veil that you were swaddled and lifted to safety.

And you can see that there are no words woven into the fabric, but how could you explain what happened to you out there on the river, beneath the veil, except to resort to the words that are still ringing in your ears: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

And you know that light is shining in your heart, and a veil has been lifted, and you believe.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 February 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

It’s not every Sunday that the Gospel reading seems so easy to disregard, as is the case this morning.  There are at least two details reported to us by Saint Mark that sound, to my ears, so hard to believe, so unlikely, so far removed from reality as to render the Gospel message nearly laughable to 21^st century ears. 

The details to which I am referring, are not the ones you may at first suspect.  I am not put off by the idea that Jesus healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever by simply taking her hand and lifting her up.  I am not suspicious of the idea that the first thing the woman did when she was healed was to go about the task of getting tea for the men, or whatever else was involved in serving them.  I do not find it dubious that Jesus healed many people there at her house, quite miraculously, or that he cast out demons – although I realize that these details do seem far-fetched to modern ears.  They are, however, almost completely plausible compared to the two claims made in Mark’s Gospel that seem at first blush to be almost impossible to the contemporary listener in Philadelphia.

The first such claim is this: “the whole city was gathered around the door.”  The city in question is Capernaum, which was no tiny village – it was a city of decent size.  But in my own mind, I tend to transpose the story to Philadelphia – though it could be any city in America.  And I find it nearly impossible to imagine such intense interest in Jesus, no matter what kind of miracles he was performing.

Admittedly, I have been an Episcopalian my entire life, so skepticism about interest in Jesus is my birthright.  Nevertheless, in my experience the only thing you can get an entire American city interested in is baseball.  I have been on Broad Street after the Phillies won the World Series.  I know what it feels like for the whole city, more or less, to be gathered with joy and enthusiasm.  I cannot picture this kind of gathering for Jesus here in my own city.  I cannot translate the English into reality: a whole city gathered around the door to come to Jesus.

The second unbelievable claim in the Gospel this morning is related to the first.  It is found on the lips of his disciples when they go looking for Jesus the next morning, for he had escaped the city environs in order to find a quiet place to pray.  Mark reports that Simon Peter, and Andrew, and James, and John “hunted” for Jesus; they tracked him down.  And when they found him they told him this: “Everyone is searching for you.”

I don’t know what that sounded like two thousand years ago, but today it sounds preposterous.  Can you believe for a moment that everyone is searching for Jesus?  Let’s not even be literal about it; be as generous as you want to be, grant Mark as much poetic license as you want.  Hoards of people are looking for Jesus?  A lot of people are looking for Jesus?  Quite a few?  A handful?  Two or three?  I won’t speak for you, I will only speak for myself – again as a lifelong Episcopalian – I have been very nearly programmed to wonder whether anyone is searching for Jesus?

Laugh if you will, but I would contend that it does not often occur to Christians of nearly any stripe these days that anyone at all is searching for Jesus.  And if we were to come across the odd person who was looking for Jesus, many Christians wouldn’t have a clue about how to help that searching soul find him.

Everyone is searching for you, Jesus.

I discovered in the New York Times this week that a young poet of sorts, a spoken word artist, attracted great attention by posting a video on YouTube entitled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”  In the poem, we are asked, “If Jesus came to your church would they actually let him in?”  Religion, in the view of the poet, is an incubator for hypocrisy:

“Religion says slave, Jesus says son.

Religion puts you in bondage, while Jesus sets you free.

Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see.”

The point of the poem is summed up in this line comparing Jesus and religion: “See, one’s the work of God, but one’s a man made invention.”  And the reason the video of the performance of this poem is of interest is because it has gone viral, as they say.  In something like two weeks, it has been viewed more than 18 million times.  By contrast, last week on an unusually busy day the Saint Mark’s website got 900 hits – an average day is more like 300.  And, the reason the video performance of the poem is of interest, in the words of one commentator, is that it “perfectly captures the mood... and confusion, of a lot of earnest, young Christians.”

Part of that mood seems to be this: At least about 18 million people just might be searching for Jesus.  And I suspect that if there are 18 million searching on YouTube there are millions more searching in other places.  But the mood also suggests that religion is perceived by many as a barrier to finding Jesus.

It’s not my purpose this morning to address that argument – you can find interesting responses to it on the Web and in the New York Times, among other places.  And I will say that I am among those who find the thinking behind “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” both highly misguided, yet important to pay attention to. 

It’s my purpose to wonder why so many of us find it so hard to believe that anyone is searching for Jesus, when everyone is searching for him – or, if not everyone, at least 18 million people, or more.

And is it any wonder?  Jesus brings healing to the broken and suffering.  Jesus brings peace to those tormented by demons.  Jesus brings freedom to those who are imprisoned.  Jesus brings hope to those mired in despair.  Jesus brings light where there is darkness.  Jesus brings life where there was only death to be found.  This is the message of the Gospel – that Jesus brings all this to the world, gives all this to the world.  And I can’t prove any of that to you; I can only ask you to come and see for yourself what happens when you put your trust in Jesus.  Or I can bring Jesus to you if you will let me, and hope that you find, as I have, that your life is better with Jesus in it.

What has happened is that a young poet, earnestly trying to express his love for the Lord of Salvation, and to share that love with others, has located a door, and a city of 18 million people have gathered around that door.

At that door the curious can linger, the inspired can replay the video, the doubtful can ask questions, the annoyed can huff and puff, the timid can get close enough to hear, and the converted can join in and write their own poems if they want to.  What they know is that the door frames something meaningful, something important, something life-giving, something life-saving.  And they know that the door frames something they have been searching for: someone they have been searching for.

When Saint Mark’s was built, more than 160 years ago, our forebears who built it understood the importance of a door.  The great red doors that face Locust Street were not actually part of the original plan; I’m not sure there was a plan for the doors that face Locust Street.  They were originally exceedingly plain.  Perhaps there was not money, or perhaps there was not an idea for what should go there, but in time both materialized – more than 50 years after the church was built – and the doors of this church were made unmistakable with their red paint, ornate hinges, and the image of Christ the King reigning over them.  Ever since, we have assumed that the role of those doors is to let people in.  Get the city to gather at your doors, and then bring them in to sing and pray and learn, and grow, and live together as a community of Christ’s love.  And, in many ways, for many years, the doors have functioned well in this manner.

But now we live in a world in which millions are listening carefully at other doors when a young man declares “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”  And when we discover that entire cities are gathering at other doorways, it may not hurt to go back to the Gospel and see what happened there.

And we find that Jesus did not open up a parish church in the home of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.  We find, in fact that he left the house very early the next morning, before the sun was up, or anyone else had awakened; he was already out the door to pray and prepare himself.

The disciples track him down to tell him that everyone is searching for him.  I suspect this means, in part, that the crowd has gathered again at the door of the house – a house that could never accommodate them all anyway

But Jesus does not go back to the house.  He is already out the door.  “Let us go on,” he says, “to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

Our doors will always be open to allow people in, to welcome them with warmth and love, and the invitation to find rest and comfort and hope in Jesus.

But sometimes we must use the doorways as Jesus did: to go out, to travel with him, to send one another on our ways, to proclaim the message where it has not and cannot be heard unless we go out through the doors.

And when we do, we should not be surprised to discover that everyone is searching for Jesus, which seems hard to believe if we shut ourselves inside the door.  But let us go on, beyond our own doorways, so that we may proclaim the message, for that is what he sends us out to do when we tell him in our prayers what he has always known, but we are only just learning: Everyone is searching for you, Jesus.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

5 February 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Death was not unknown to Simeon.  His mother had died in childbirth – it was not uncommon in those days.  And he had been raised by an older sister – barely a teenager herself.  But his sister died of consumption when she was still a young woman.  And Simeon had nursed her during her last, long, fitful, coughing, dying days.  He could not, of course, remember his mother, though her death was very much a part of who he was; missing her was a part of who he was; he was a motherless child.

He could, however, remember the death of his sister.  He remembered the pallor of her vacant face on the day she died.  He remembered closing her eyelids, and letting go of her hand for the last time.  He remembered the women from their neighborhood who came to prepare her body for burial.  He remembered their tears, and their sobs of mourning, and he remembered the business-like way they went about caring for her body: they had done this before, more than once.  He remembered filling in her grave with his cousins, her own children, whose sibling he’d always considered himself, and not without some cause, if not by reason of blood.

It was not too many years later that his father was taken from him, too, in an accident involving an ox-cart hauling stone.  The accident didn’t kill Simeon’s father, it only broke his leg.  But the fix for a broken leg was not so easy in those days.  A recovering invalid for a few weeks; eventually infection set in, causing his father great pain.  The fever did not last for too long; Simeon witnessed this too.  He saw the sickness and the pain wrack his old man, and eventually take him without too much of a fight.  And again the women came to deal with the body.  And again there was the mound of dry, dusty dirt to be shoveled on top of the corpse in the ground, one silent, tearful scoop at a time.

For a while, death seemed at bay.  It was never far, of course, in a city like Jerusalem, but it would at least be some years before it invaded his own household again.  Simeon married – a sweet, plain, strong girl who bore children easily and was a good mother to them.  They lived not far from her family.  His four children all survived the dangerous first year when infants are so vulnerable to so many things, at which point so many families those days lost at least one.  But not Simeon’s kids.  They were growing up fast. 

Then, in middle school, his second oldest came down with something – spots all over, a soaring fever that wouldn’t go away for days.  The three other children were sent away to their cousin’s house.  Spices and incense and prayers were deployed in and around and on the child. Wet compresses.  Olive oil was rubbed into his skin for relief.  But the fever wouldn’t leave.  The boy stopped eating – too weak.  And they couldn’t get enough water into him.  He was shrinking – this beautiful healthy boy with thick hair and dark eyes – shrinking right before their eyes, wasting away.  Because he was a strong boy he held on.  But his eyes were now sunken, and it was almost as though he was aging in fast-forward.  If only he would eat!  If only he could drink!  But he became weaker and weaker.  His voice – still years away from dropping into lower registers – became little more than a squeak.  If the fever abated for a day, it came back stronger over night.  Until, at last, it took him.

What does a father do on the day his ten-year old son dies?   Is it enough to cry?  Do you let the women who come for the body see your tears?  Do you let your wife glimpse them through the vale of her own?  Do you accuse God and make demands of him?  How do you tell his brothers and his sisters, who, of course, already know?  How do you stare down again into the grave?  What are you to make of that small-ish bundle swaddled too well in these last bed clothes?  Why would a father cast dirt on his son’s body?  There is something wrong about this, and yet inescapably necessary.  You can’t leave him uncovered, any more than you would fail to pull the covers over his sleeping body at night.  But this blanket of earth will never be drawn back.  No sleepy child will emerge from it in the morning looking for his breakfast. 

And so you do what you must; he did what he must.  Tightening his jaw, and fixing his eyes into stare that would not peek to the left or to the right; he heard the prayers sung, the women cry.  He stepped to his place by the grave and the mound of dirt beside it.  His hands knew the feel of this shovel; he had used it before.  He decided that he would pretend he did not know what was in the hole he was filling back in with earth.  He was just doing a job that needed doing.  He was not burying his son – that would be too cruel.  But someone had to fill in this dangerous hole, and here he was to do it.  If anyone spoke to him, he had no idea what they said.  He just had to finish with this pile of dirt and get it over with.  He didn’t know who took the shovel from him.  He didn’t know who kept it, and where it came from when it was needed at times like this, to be thrust into his hands.  But now it was back in whose-ever custody, and out of his hands.  He was finished with this awful work.

Not long after the boy died, Simeon started to have dreams.  First he dreamt of his mother, and he wondered if she had actually been so beautiful in real life.  She was beautiful in his dreams, bathed with light from somewhere.  And she sang to him in his dreams, as though he was still a child.

Before long, in his dreams, his mother was joined by his sister, who added harmony to the songs their mother sang.  It was as though they had been able to rehearse for just this purpose: to sing the songs to him in his dreams that they could not sing to him in his waking hours.

In time the two women’s voices were joined by a man’s voice.  It was his father.  Sometimes his father came to him alone in his dreams, sometimes he was with the others, as though they were reunited in his dreams.  And Simeon dreamt that he sang along with the three of them.  Perhaps he did sing in his sleep; he had no idea.

These were not bad dreams; they were sweet dreams.  Simeon was not jolted out of his sleep by them, rather, he was lulled into a deeper, more contented and restful sleep.  It was not disturbing to him to be visited in his dreams by his mother, his sister, his father.  There was a soft embrace in these dreams, that sometimes seemed perfectly matched to the soft embrace of his wife sleeping beside him, her breath on the back of his neck, her arm resting on his shoulder, her deep breathing adding a gentle rhythm to the songs of his dreams.

Some nights he dreamt of his son.  And when his son entered his dreams there was no one else in them.  All other voices stopped their singing, all the other night visitors left his dreams to make room for the boy: his body restored, his eyes dark and alive again, his hair, a little longer than his father would have wanted it, glistening from the light around him.  And when the boy began to sing his clear treble voice, still unchanged, was almost too much, almost too beautiful.  He sang from the Psalms, Simeon recognized the words. 

Sometimes he sang laments:

“By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.” 

But more often he sang of hope:

“Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young….

“Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are thy ways…

“Who, going through the vale of misery use it for a well, and the pools are filled with water.”

In the darkest hours of the night, the deepest hours of his sleep, the singing voices of his beloved dead would cease.  And he would dream of a bright light – the light that surrounded those who sang to him in his dreams.  The light had no voice, and there was nothing written in it.  There was no music coming from it, but there was a message in the light, a message meant for Simeon.  The only sound he could hear was something like the beating of wings, softly but powerfully, as though the wings could beat that way forever to carry whatever creature they belonged to across the universe without effort.

The message came to him this way: without words or language, only somehow spelled out in the light, heard in the long, slow beating of the mighty wings.  It took many nights of dreams for Simeon to put the message together, to remember it in his waking hours.  And he could not have explained it to you if he had to, but he knew from his dreams that Messiah was coming, and that he would not taste death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.

For years Simeon dreamed like this.  He told no one of his dreams; he had no need to; not even his wife.  And death stayed at bay.

Then his wife began to get forgetful, and to look at him, from time to time with a vacant look, as though she didn’t know where she was, or who he was.  She would snap out of it, and they both pretended that nothing had happened, because almost nothing had happened.  But these episodes began to become more frequent, and to last a little longer.

Simeon’s dreams occurred less frequently now, but the memory of them was palpable.  He sometimes felt he could hear the beating of those mighty wings even while he was awake.  He sometimes felt as though there was a light somewhere inside of him, guiding him while he was awake.  And he sometimes felt as though he understood what it would mean that he would not die before he had seen Messiah – though at other times merely thinking such a thought seemed like an exercise in nonsense.

Simeon had known death so well and so personally all his life; he felt as though death had been a nearly constant, unwanted neighbor who sometimes moved into his own home.  And death had always brought with it the tears, the sadness, the women to care for the body, and the shovel to fill in the grave.

His dreams did not come to him from death – they were a kind of gift that came from somewhere else, from the light.  But they were few and far between now, and not much consolation as he watched his wife slip deeper and deeper into dementia.

Mostly she was quiet and somewhat absent, staring off into some vague middle distance.  But when he had to move her from one place to another -for meals, for instance – she could easily become ornery.  Sometimes she remembered his name, but when she did, it was often when she would lean into his shoulder and whimper as he stroked her hair, and she would ask him, “Why, Simeon, why?  How long, Simeon, how long?”

Eventually even this communication came to an end.  More and more she was confined to her bed; there was no reason to get up out of it anyway.  He brought her her meals on a tray, and propped pillows behind her back to make her comfortable.  He made her Cream of Wheat when she could not eat anything more solid.  And he fed her spoons-full of yogurt, and when the children brought over containers of homemade chicken soup, he shared the meal with her from the same bowl, the same spoon.

He would have appreciated dreams in the night, but there were almost no dreams any more.  There was only the sound of her weaker, less-steady breathing.  And there was the faint echo in his head of the beating of a pair of wings, and a slight glimmer of light in his mind’s eye as he tried to fall asleep.

When she finally died, his own daughters brought with them the women, and sang with them the songs of mourning, and organized the sitting of shiva.  His first-born son was there at the graveside – a man now.  And he helped with the shovel when the time came to fill in the grave, using only the backside of the shovel.  Like his father, he fixed his eyes straight ahead, and tightened his jaw, and did the work that needed to be done.  He shed his tears, but not too many, like his father.  And when he stood by the now-covered grave, holding the shovel with his right hand leaning just on the top of the handle, his father Simeon, standing next to him, put his left hand on top of his son’s right hand, leaning on him, leaning on the shovel, and they dared not look at each other then.

And when Simeon went to bed that night, and for night after night for many months after that, he lay there awake, with nobody next to him.  He remembered his mother, and his sister, his father, his second son, his sweet, plain, strong wife.  He strained to hear singing in the night, but he could hear none.  He thought he could see a light far away in his mind’s eye.  He could still hear the faintest memory of the echo of the beating of wings.  Eventually he would drift off to sleep.

For months he had nothing to do.  His children provided for his needs.  They brought him food on the nights that he refused to accept their invitations to dinner.  His grandchildren delivered bowls of stew and loaves of bread wrapped in clean kitchen towels.  There was nothing for him to do.

He started to go for walks through Jerusalem – and always he found himself drawn to the temple.  He did not venture in through the gates.  For months he only walked around the outer wall of the temple.  As he walked, he hummed to himself songs – and since they were not songs he had ever heard before, he suspected that they were the songs that the dead had sung to him in his dreams.  He did not know anymore whether or not death was something to be feared or welcomed; he could not tell if death would be his friend or his enemy.  He only knew how much a part of his life death had been, and that it had never brought happiness.

One day he ventured in through the gates, into the outer courts of the temple.  Here it was OK for a lay person like him to wander, to sit, to pray, and to watch the transactions take place of those buying and selling for the temple sacrifices.  So he walked, and he sat, and he hummed to himself the songs that he hoped were the songs of the dead.  And from time to time he would weep, quietly, gently, shedding only a few tears, but no less real for the scarcity of them.  And so he sat or paced about the outer court of the temple for month after month, in good weather and in bad.

And one day, as he sat on a stone bench by the wall, half dozing, he heard a sound that sounded like the clear, strong beating of a pair of wings, a sound he remembered well.  And before he could even open his eyes (he knew they were still shut) he could see a bright light, brighter than the sun. 

And when he opened his eyes he saw coming in his direction, a grungy couple carrying an infant child in their arms.

The sound of beating wings was growing louder and louder.  And the light was still shining – his eyes were now open, but he could see that a light bathed them all around, though he suspected none of them could see the light, and he was right.

Simeon felt himself lifted up onto his feet, almost as if the wings were his.  He felt himself carried forward.  And he could see in the light that no one else could see, the faces of his mother, his sister, his father, his second-born son.  And he could hear their voices singing the same songs they had always sung in his dreams.  He was carried in this way to the little family of three making their way to a table to buy a pair of doves.

Everything seemed to stop.  The money changers stopped changing money, the vendors stopped vending, the little family stopped their progress.  A hush fell on the outer court – who knows what was happening inside the temple now?  And no one knew why any of this was happening.

Simeon seemed taller than he had ever been.  Although his feet were on the ground, he seemed somehow to be seeing all this from a few inches above.  To his eyes, the entire courtyard was bathed in the light that he had only known inside his dreams before, but now it was shining out in the open, and he could see where it was coming from.

The light was coming from the child in the girl’s arms.  He had no idea if anyone else could see it – and he knew it hardly mattered.  The sound of the beating of the wings was ferocious but completely unthreatening: he drew power from it, as though they were his wings.

And he opened his mouth, knowing that he was about to sing, but he didn’t know what he was to sing.  And this is what it was:

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace;

for mine eyes have seen thy salvation,

which thou hast prepared before the face of thy people;

to be a light to lighten the Gentiles;

and to be the glory of thy people Israel.”

A few days later Simeon’s son listened as his father breathed his last breath.  With his own fingers he closed his father’s eyelids, and his heart ached as he pulled his hand out of the grasp of his father’s hand for the last time.  And when the women came he let them do their work.  And he stood by the grave the next day, and he took hold of the shovel that his father had held before him, and flipped it the wrong way round so as to use only the back of the head of the shovel to fill in his father’s grave.  And his own son helped him to do it.

And that night when he fell asleep he had a dream that he couldn’t quite remember the next day, but he knew it was a dream bathed in light, and he thought he could hear the beating of wings somewhere.  And somehow he knew that he was dreaming a dream that his father had dreamed before him, except that at the end of the dream there was something he knew his father had not dreamed:  there was just the image of this child Jesus, carried in his mother’s arms through the outer court of the temple.  And with this vision he could hear the voice of his father singing a song in a clear voice.  And when he heard this song in his dreams, Simeon’s son knew that it was more than a song of the dead, it was a song of the living:

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

The Bible is full of signs from God.  You remember recently we heard about the star that was a sign to the wise men.  Way back in the stories of Moses you may recall all kinds of signs God gave back in the day: from turning his staff into a serpent to dividing the waters of the Red Sea.  The message is: if you want to know where to find God – and especially if you want to know whose side God is on – then look for the signs.  Water flowing from a rock; manna raining down from heaven; a dove and a voice from heaven; a rainbow in the sky; a vision of the heavenly court; a ladder that stretches into heaven; angels singing sweetly through the night.  The pages of the Bible regularly supply us with vivid images of signs from God meant to prove that God is in charge, or to demonstrate something that someone might normally be reluctant or unprepared to believe.

The desire for signs has not diminished in our own times.  The recent best-seller that tells of a “little boy’s astounding story of his trip to heaven and back” is touted as a sign that “Heaven is for Real.”  Religious leaders regularly see signs of God in weather events and natural disasters. The work of the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider has recently been linked to the possible discovery of the so-called God-particle, which, if identified, would, I guess, provide a sign - proof that God actually does exist, but can only been found with a really, really big particle accelerator!  This would be a more satisfying sign to many of us than the face of Jesus appearing in a piece of burnt toast.

You might say that it is very hard to be a person of faith – or a person looking for faith – and not to look for signs.  How are you supposed to know whether God is up there, out there, or wherever he or she or it is?  How are you supposed to know what God wants you to do?  And how are you supposed to know that the signs you see aren’t actually delusions, as a great many people would like you to believe?  If God isn’t going to post videos on YouTube to make his presence and his will known, then how can believers avoid looking for signs?

The view from a mountaintop, the breeze across a lake, the gurgle of a stream can all provide signs of God in the world.  And so can the cries of a newborn, the outstretched hand of a homeless person, or the purring of a kitten.  This season of the church year, in fact, is meant to be all about signs – all about remembering the signs of God’s revelation of his presence in the world in the person of his Son, Jesus of Nazareth.  Healthy young fishermen will leave their boats at his beckoning, demons will quit their sorry victims, illness will be put to flight – just wait and see in the stories that we read in the coming weeks.  Sadly, this year we will not read about the wine being turned into water, but it is a favorite sign, and one most Episcopalians have never stopped hoping to see repeated.

Today we hear about one of the silliest and least convincing signs of all: Jesus claims to have seen Nathanael under a fig tree at some earlier point in time.  That’s it.  Which, if any of you were to believe was a sign that you had had a personal encounter with the messiah, I would suggest more therapy.

Moments ago, Nathaniel was sneering at Jesus as a redneck from Nazareth, but when Jesus, says, “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree,” Nathaniel believes he has seen a sign that here indeed is the Son of God, the King of Israel.  It wasn’t much of a sign to go on, but apparently it was all Nathanael needed.

If you are preoccupied with signs, you might leave here today thinking that this is the point of the story.  If I was preoccupied with signs, I might spend the next few minutes trying to convince you what an absolutely terrifically important sign this is, not only to Nathanael, but to you.  I might suggest that I have seen you sitting under proverbial fig trees, that Jesus sees you under them even now, and that he has sent me to you to give you a sign!  But I am not preoccupied with signs – not today anyway – and I hope that today you are not either.  Because if we were preoccupied with signs we might have stopped listening to Jesus already, and we might not hear what comes next.  Don’t look!  Can you remember what Jesus says to Nathanael after he more or less laughs at Nathaniel’s simple-minded preoccupation with what may or may not have been a sign?

This is what Jesus says: “You will see greater things than these.”

It is by no means clear that Nathanael believes Jesus, or has any idea what he means by this, but it will transpire, twenty chapters later in John’s Gospel, that Nathanael will be there by the Sea of Galilee when the risen Jesus appears to his disciples, although they do not know it is him until he gives them a sign.  And Nathanael, who might have been known only for his quick-witted insult of Jesus, is among the first to see and know that the promises of new life through Jesus are true, because the Lord is risen, and the gates of death and hell would not prevail against him!  “You will see greater things than these,” Jesus had said to Nathanael. And so it will prove to be.

You come to church, maybe every week – maybe not so often.  What signs do you see here?  What signs have you seen in your life?

Do you see signs of God’s real presence in the Bread and the Wine as I lift them up for you to see and the bells are rung?

Do you see signs in the faces of the hungry people we feed here every Saturday morning?

Do you see signs in the colors of light streaming through the windows just now?

Do you hear signs in the notes that the choir sings, the organ plays, or in the hymns to which you join your voices?

Have you seen signs in the wilderness when the beauty of God’s creation is spread out before you?

Have you seen signs in the twinkle of your little child’s eyes?

Did you pray for a sign of God’s presence as you stood vigil at your loved one’s death bed?

Have you tasted a sign of God’s work in a loaf of bread that was baked for you, or in a piece of fruit that was picked or peeled or squeezed for you?  Or in a meal that was served to you?

Has the rain brought you signs of God’s work?  Or the sunshine?

All of these are places that I believe I have seen signs of God.  And yet, somehow they can all fall short.  Signs are great as long as they last, but they don’t last long, and it’s not always clear what we are to make of them, and there is this modern nagging suspicion that all those signs are just delusions anyway.

But believing in Jesus is not just about seeing signs in things where other people see delusions.  Believing in Jesus is believing in the promise that you will see greater things than these.

This was God’s promise to Abraham, who assumed he had nothing before him but the waning years of his childless old age. You will see greater things than these.

This was God’s promise to Joseph, who was left in a pit and sold into slavery by his brothers.  You will see greater things than these.

This was God’s promise to his people through Moses, who had nothing to look forward to but increasing hardship and abuse at the hand of Pharaoh.  You will see greater things than these.

This was God’s promise through his prophets to his people when they were carried into exile.  You will see greater things than these.

This was God’s promise to all who came to visit the straw-strewn manger where a child was nursed by his mother beneath the light of a twinkling star.  You will see greater things than these.

And this is God’s promise to every one of us, when we sometimes feel as though we have to grasp at straws for signs of God’s promise.  You will see greater things than these.

Was that a message from God spelled out in your Cheerios yesterday morning?  And have you missed the fleeting chance to know what God is doing in your life because you gobbled them up too soon?  No, you will see greater things than these.

Does the faith you once felt long ago, but which has slipped away as you’ve gotten older, and begun to lose your friends, and your family, and your soul-mate, feel worn and flimsy?  You will see greater things than these.

Have the songs that once you could sing out in full voice become hard to sing?  You will see greater things than these.

Does it seem that maybe once, long ago it seemed possible that Jesus saw you, sitting under a fig tree or wherever, but now, the signs of his love are distant memories, that seem less real to you, and that your children are inclined to ignore?  You will see greater things than these.

What can you do if your faith was built on signs, but the signs have all faded, and you have begun to wonder if you ever saw them in the first place?  Did you believe just because someone once told you that Jesus sees you under your fig tree?  Did you believe just because of the signs?

Let me promise you that God is not done with you and with me; we will see greater things.

The life of faith is not just a life in which you receive the worn out old promises of a rickety old God and his dusty old religion.  It is a life that carries with it the promise of greater things: a land flowing with milk and honey, for instance.  The whole story of the Bible is the promise of greater things, and all the heroes of the Bible clung fast to this promise: that you will see greater things.

But too many of us have somehow concluded that there is not much more to faith than reading the tea leaves of the world around us and seeing God in them, or not.  And if your faith rests on whether or not God is going to provide a sign on a piece of toast, then that faith can be smothered with nothing more than a spoonful of marmalade.

Faith in God has always been built on the promise of greater things, and it has always been delivered to those who are in need of them: the childless, the homeless, the wandering, the depressed, the poor, the hungry, the battered, the frightened, the abused, the war-torn, the abandoned, and the out-of-luck.

Perhaps some small sign is given: a birdsong, a passage of Scripture, the helping hand of a stranger.  And now what?  Will I see greater things?  Or is this all there is, these little signs to be embraced or dismissed?  Yes, you will see greater things than these.  The Christian puts one foot in front of the other every day because of this hope – you will see greater things.  And from time to time we have glimpses of the greater things God has in store.

From time to time we approach the altar with nothing left in our souls, and no confidence even in the signs that led us there.  We are ready to give up, but we are still going through the motions out of habit.  And in a moment of silence, no sign is given, but we discover the assurance that God is in the world.  How do you know it?  You don’t.  You have received no sign; you only ate the bread and sipped the wine like you always do, but you knew that you had met Christ for a moment at his table, and he reminded you that he is not done with you yet.

From time to time we realize how desperately we are in need of forgiveness.  We put off dealing with it, we avoid certain people, we make excuses for ourselves.  But by God’s grace we have a moment of weakness when we are able to confess and to seek forgiveness.  We know we don’t deserve it, but we kneel before God and ask him to forgive us.  And without any sign at all of his work, God waves his hand over our heads and wipes away the sin that has troubled us so, and sends us on our way.

God has planted the vision of a promised land in our hearts.  And although many signs point to it, none of them leads us directly there.  Not yet.  But you will see greater things.

I thank God for the signs he allows us to see, and I pray that not too many of them are delusions (though probably a few of them are).  And I hope that you see signs of God’s work in the world and in your life, too.

But there is something very important to remember, both when the signs seem to be coming at you fast and furious, and when they are but a distant memory.  You will see greater things than these.

God is not done with you or with me. He has greater things in store.  He has a place, a promised land, to which he is leading us, and if we forget that, then there will be no point in paying attention to the signs anyway.  By all means, look for the signs of God’s work in your life and in the world.  Be a skeptic about the signs if you want.  But never forget that there are greater things in store for you.

One day you will be on the shore of a distant lake, and there will be a figure there who you do not recognize.  Perhaps he will show you a sign, and it will all make sense.  Or maybe there will be no sign at all; maybe he will just call you by name.  And you will remember that once, in the midst of your search for signs, he promised you that you would see greater things.

And now that you can see them all unfolding before you, you feel that you can finally breathe, and at last in this new world of greater things, you discover that you are meant to live!

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 January, 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Phialdelphia

You may listen to Father Mullen's Sermon here.

On a hot August morning in the summer of love, at a little church, St Peter’s, on the corner of 244^th Street and 138^th Avenue in Queens, Fr. Rix Pierce Butler turned to my parents and godparents and said to them, “Name this Child.”  Most families in Queens didn’t have family names that they were especially keen to pass on and preserve, so my parents gave me names that they liked: Sean Edward.

Just yesterday, I turned to a young couple who I married here at Saint Mark’s more than eight years ago, and who now live in Oklahoma but who returned here for the baptism of their second child - a little girl who was born eleven weeks ago – and I did what an older version of the Prayer Book used to instruct:  the rubrics of the old book say, “Then shall the Minister take the Child into his arms, and shall say to the Godfathers and Godmothers, ‘Name this Child.’”

“Margaret Rose,” they answered me.

The newer version of the Prayer Book that we use here has dropped this instruction, along with the pretense that somehow a child’s actual parents are not responsible for seeing that he or she is brought up in the Christian faith.  There are lots of complicated, and no doubt good reasons that this detail has been dropped from modern liturgies, not the least of which is that we no longer expect that the person being baptized is an infant.  But since many children are still baptized in church, it has seemed a shame to me to fail to ask for the child to be named at that point. 

Margaret Rose’s names – her given, or Christian names, as they are sometimes called – are borrowed from her maternal grandmothers.  I often explain to parents at baptism that they don’t need to include the family name since God will not be looking us up in the phone book.  He knows us each by name, and in some cases, I expect, even by nickname.  He has no need to keep track of us in alphabetical order by last name.

And so the instruction has been given here many times: Name this Child.

Name this Child: Henry.

Name this Child: Claire.

Name this Child: Nico.

Name this Child: Maximillian.

Name this Child: Nathan.

Name this Child: Cornelius.

Name this Child: Jude

Just to call to mind the names that have been given in this church in the last few months.

Do you remember what happened when the angel Gabriel visited an old priest named Zechariah and told him that his wife would have a child and that this child should be named John?  The old man finds it heard to believe that his wife will give birth in her old age, and so he is made mute for the duration of the pregnancy. 

And on the eighth day after the child was born, it came time to circumcise him, according to Jewish custom, and to give him his name on that day.  After the baby’s foreskin was cut, his father should have recited a prayer of thanksgiving, but he could not.  He was silent, too, as a drop of wine was put into the child’s mouth.  Now it was time to recite the prayer that would give the boy his name.  And all those gathered expected that he would be named for his father, Zechariah.  But Elizabeth, his mother, tells them, “ He is to be called John.”

“But none of your relatives has this name,” they argue with her.  And they turn to Zechariah to ask his opinion.  And Zechariah, who must have been feeling a little sorry for himself, asks for a writing tablet, and he writes, “His name is John,”

And St, Luke tells us that “immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God.”  He had named his child, just as God had instructed.

Now, Zechariah was a priest of the Temple, a descendent of Aaron, to whom had been entrusted the blessing that God wished to see pronounced on his people:

“The LORD bless you and keep you;

The LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

“So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” God had said to Moses.

Zechariah was not a high priest.  It did not fall to him to pronounce the name of God ten times in the inner precincts of the Temple on Yom Kippur.  But he knew something of the power of a name.  And when he was asked to name his child, it was not a casual thing to recall the angel Gabriel standing before him, with his wings still unfurled, and tell him the name by which his son would be known to God.

Name this Child: His name is John.

Just so, a few months later, still camping out in Bethlehem, the little family of Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, and Joseph, her fiancé, and their baby would have made arrangements for the circumcision of their child.  Joseph’s tongue had not been tied, his lips were not sealed, but how uneasy might it have been for him to say the words of blessing and thanksgiving that a father says for his son on this day, knowing full well that he was not the father of this child?  Did he argue with Mary about it the night before?

The shepherds wouldn’t have cared, but they had returned to their flocks.  Were questions asked before the ceremony began?  Or did a tacit agreement to leave the matter of parentage unmentioned hold sway?  Who was it that recited the kiddush over the wine after Joseph’s prayer of thanksgiving?  And who said this prayer or something like it:

“Creator of the universe, may it be your will to regard and accept this act of circumcision as if I had brought this baby before your glorious throne.  And in your abundant mercy, through your holy angels, give a pure heart to Yeshua, to Jesus, the son of… who?  Of Joseph?  Of Mary?  ...  who was just now circumcised in honor of your great Name.  May his heart be wide open to comprehend your holy Law, that he may learn and teach, keep and fulfill your laws.  Amen.”

Did the rabbi, or the mohel, or the cantor, or whoever it was that stumbled through those prayers with Mary and Joseph know what it was to name that child?  Could they tell in the speaking of his name that the world was shifting now beneath their feet?

Did Zechariah, however many miles away he was, perhaps bouncing his own son on his knee, feel the ancient blessing stirred inside of him? 

Could they tell, only a few miles away from Jerusalem, that they were now speaking with great ease and fluency a name as holy as the Name of God that they had meticulously avoided saying out loud, lest they should blaspheme and take that holy Name in vain?

Did they remember who it was who had named this child?  That like his cousin, John, his name had been delivered by message of the archangel Gabriel who told Mary that she would bear a son, and that she should name him Jesus?

But God delights to allow us all to Name this Child Jesus: to call him by his name; to know him by it, and to be known by him, by name.  Year after year, month after month, day after day, God allows us to Name this Child in our hearts… because to name him is to know who he is, and who his father is, and to claim the power of the Holy Spirit whose over-shadowing conceived him in the womb of his mother.

You and I will name other children.  Some of you have known the joy of naming your own children, and offering prayers of thanksgiving to the God who knows us each by name.  But when we Name this Child we speak the name of our salvation, and heaven’s portals open, and hell quakes with the echoes of the name that spells its doom, and the angels delight to hear the Name given to God’s Son.

So let us make only one new year’s resolution this year, and let us keep it together right now: Let us Name this Child, Jesus.  Name him as your Lord and Savior.  Name him as your friend and Companion.  Name him as your joy and your love.

Name this Child.  Name him Jesus, and then hear him call you by Name, and tell you that he loves you, and always has, since he, too, knows you by Name.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

1 January 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Phialdelphia