Saint Mark's Church

Seven score and ten years ago, our fathers embarked on an adventure of slaughter that would soak the ground with blood.  We have our wars today, but have sent them overseas, like so many other difficult endeavors.  We hear about them from a distance, and remain mostly untroubled as we wait for the price of gas to fall, the stock market to rise, and a cheaper way to get cable TV.  But the nation we populate today was forged in bloodshed, close-up and personal: first in a revolution, and then refined in a civil war that one soldier called a “carnival of blood.”  625,000 soldiers died in the Civil War – about a third of them in combat, the others from illness or other causes.  The war unfurled carpets of dead bodies on battlefields from Gettysburg to Vicksburg and beyond, as the machinery of war grew ever more efficient and effective.

One of the great heroes of the war (on this side of the Mason-Dixon line) lived around the corner from here on 19^th Street, and was a member of this parish.  General George Gordon Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac at the bloodbath of Gettysburg where the tide of the war began to turn toward victory for the Union.  Not long after the war, General Meade would be buried from this church, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.

An odd discovery was made in the aftermath of Gettysburg when they finally got around to cleaning up the battlefield.  Of the weapons gathered up, some 24,000 rifles were still loaded, suggesting to some historians that a great many soldiers were reluctant to fire their weapons.  Hard to say.  Easier to say that a great many were perfectly willing to do so.

On another battlefield in Georgia, the bloodiest battle after Gettysburg, the story is told of a Confederate soldier who decided he was unwilling to kill the advancing Yankees, and stood on the battlefield firing his weapon directly up into the air.  When his captain threatened to shoot him if he didn’t aim at the enemy, the soldier is said to have replied “You can kill me if you want to, but I am not going to appear before my God with the blood of another man on my soul.”  How things turned out for the soldier does not appear to be part of the historic record.

The Bishop of Georgia at the time said that “to shed such blood as we have spilled in this contest for the mere name of independence, for the vanity or the pride of having a separate national existence, would be unjustifiable before God and man.  We must have higher aims than these.”  But if those higher aims were to justify the enslavement of other human beings, then they have been shown to be worthless.

A Yankee preacher declared from the safety of Rhode Island that the dead were “the price and purchase-money of our triumph,” and that “in this blood our unity is cemented and forever sanctified,” which is easier said from Providence than from Richmond or Atlanta.[i]

As the end of the war was nearing, President Lincoln could invoke the providence of the divine hand, which “has its own purposes,” by quoting the Psalms: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”  And when that great man died from his own bullet wound on Good Friday of 1865, at least one earnest clergyman made the connection to the Passion of our Lord, asserting about Lincoln that “one man has died for the people, in order that the whole nation might not perish.”

The blood flowing through the veins of this nation belongs to men and women of other generations, and yet it has not forged us into one nation, nor could it ever.  And yet as a people, a society, a nation, we have not stopped looking for other men to kill in the hopes that we will accomplish some righteous deed, and prove ourselves good.  That we are not alone in this regard does not excuse us, for we can only be responsible for ourselves.

We cling to the notion that there are certain murders that will be good for us; that it will be expedient that one man, here and there, should die for the people.  The target changes from time to time, but the idea remains more or less the same.  But even the bullets fired into the wisest father this nation has ever known on that Good Friday of 1865 did not make us one nation, under God.  His sacrifice could accomplish little more than grief and sorrow that lingers to this day when we reflect on it.

Was it really that idea – that one man should die for the people – that riled the crowd, and convinced the governor to crucify Jesus?  Perhaps, although it seems a bit far-fetched.  Something turned the crowd from their cheers of Hosanna! to the cries to crucify him.  Maybe it was precisely the fear that he really was the Messiah, and therefore blood was sure to be spilled – since they assumed the anointed one would soon raise an army and take up arms – that they preferred the idea that his blood should be spilled rather than theirs.  Who knows? 

Today we are swimming upstream in the blood of history to the veins of one who was guilty of nothing.  His blood is mingled now with the blood that seeped into the soil from here to Mississippi, more or less.  Was there something noble in the sacrifice of all those men seven score and ten years ago?  No doubt there was.  Was there something holy in it?  Maybe so.  Did it accomplish, as Lincoln asserted, the purposes of God?  We console ourselves with the thought that perhaps it did.

But only once have God’s purposes required the offering of blood, and on that Good Friday, it was his own blood to shed.

We continue to yield to the tempting notion that there is more bloodshed that can accomplish righteous deeds, and we devise ways to carry out this desire in broad daylight, as though it were less gruesome, somehow, than the self-inflicted carnival of blood this nation endured all those years ago.  Would we do better to fire our ammunition into the air, if we must shoot at something, than to appear before our God with the blood of other men on our souls?  The folly of bloodshed in war persists in the vain hope of righteousness, even as the thought that Jesus’ death and bloodshed meant anything at all sounds more like a fairy tale to many people.  And so we continue to put more hope in the blood that we can shed than in the blood that was shed for us.

In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said all he needed to say about slavery when he said that “it may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.  But,” he went on, “let us judge not, that we be not judged.”[ii]  He might have said that it is stranger still to ask God’s assistance in wringing righteousness from another man’s blood.  Still, we must judge not, that we be not judged.

But it would be wise of us to learn how strange and costly it is for us to imagine that we could ever wring anything but misery and suffering out of bloodshed, and certainly not righteousness.  For the righteous spilling of blood, that has the power to redeem all the blood ever shed, and which is somehow redeeming all that bloodshed by the secret workings of God’s grace, was accomplished once and for all by God when he gave his Son to suffer and to die on a green hill far away.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Palm Sunday, 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] All quotations except Lincoln’s are from Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, New York: Vintage Civil War Library, 2008

[ii] Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March, 1865

As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. (Jn 9:5)

To be blind for a moment or two is easy: just shut your eyes tight and keep the light out.  Try to stop up your ears to keep the sound out – not so easy.  Or try to tie your tongue, to keep it from wagging – even harder.  Try to hobble yourself, to make yourself lame, and you will struggle to approximate the real thing.  But it is easy to blind yourself for a little while, and with a good blindfold you can extend your blindness indefinitely.  But of course, if we are only faking it, we can always escape it.  Try to keep your eyes shut for the duration of this sermon if you want to see whether it is easy or hard for you to be blind for a short time. Go ahead and try.

If I close my eyes, I see windows where the windows were before, until they begin to fade.  I think I see colors, too.  I seem to see corridors and highways opening up before me in the darkness that I could travel down, and I wonder if I should go to them.  If I keep my eyes closed long enough I can hear things I d not normally hear.  I can hear the hum of the air handling equipment beneath us.  I can hear the detail of conversation on the street outside, and the traffic.  If birds were singing I would hear them.  If the springtime blossoms were opening I’d detect the rustle of their unfurling leaves.  If snow was falling I’d sense the multiform flakes piling up on top of each other.  Or course I’d hear the rain  - any fool can hear the rain!  If I allow myself to be blind in church, I can smell the layers of incense of today blended with a century and more of Sundays.  And I think I can detect the scent of your perfume.

And this morning, if I keep my eyes shut tight and allow myself to be blind, I can hear this conversation that I know is not about me, since I have not been blind since birth, but I feel it is taking place in front of me, just like it did for that man, all those years ago.  I can hear the ruckus as a group approaches: arguing amongst themselves.  Some voices are smug and challenging, others are nervous and defensive.  One is calm and self-assured.  I hear the footsteps stop in front of me. 

If I keep my eyes shut, it seems to me that I am not there, it seems I can eavesdrop on this conversation, it seems they will not notice me.  I cannot see me; maybe they can’t either.  I scrunch my eyelids close together to hide, and to listen, but they are talking about me:  “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Wait!  I want to cry out!  I was not born blind – you have me mistaken with someone else.  You have confused me with the man in the story, who really was born blind!  I can see - I want to shout and pop my eyelids open to prove it, but I am a little captivated by this discussion.  I am a little curious about the blind man’s sins.  It seems like a little research project, a little intelligence gathering, a little spying to find out about his sins – since someone else’s sins are always so much more easy to confront than my own – and so much more interesting to talk about!

I want to hear about this.  I want to listen objectively to the argument that is about to follow, one of those arguments like how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.  I want to sit silently with my eyelids closed and soak up the self-absorbed religious debate that passes for theological discussion, the kind of thing that goes on in churches and synagogues.  The question was offensive to me even before I adopted my temporary solidarity with the blind this morning:  Who sinned, me or my parents, that I was born blind?  Who thinks like that?  I can’t wait to hear this! 

But the answer is surprising, not what I expect.  “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him…” says the calm and self-assured voice.  This, of course, is not true.  And I know it as soon as I hear him say it.  My eyes are closed, as they have been for a while now.  And it is easy for me, to dismiss immediately the notion that my parents have anything to do with my troubles.  But at the thought of my own sins, I reach, in my mind’s eye, for that full-color catalog of them – not the little ones that are easy to forget, but the big ones that I have kept in the inner cupboards of my heart, but that come so easily into vision when I close my eyes and shut out all other distractions. 

There are the hurts I have caused, the unkind words I have spoken, the pain I have inflicted.  There is a list of things I said I would do but never “got around to.”  There are faces in front of me in my memory that are stained with tears that I caused.  There are ringing phones I did not answer.  There are hands reaching out to me that I refused to grasp.  There are vicious words I hissed, still hissing in the vaporous air.  There are so many things done and left undone; it is not hard for me to see them in the dark.

How could anyone say I have not sinned?  Only someone who doesn’t know, who cannot see what I can see so clearly with my eyes shut tight, with nothing but my own soul to look into, what makes my stomach churn with self-knowledge.  I know the answer to the question.  I know who sinned.  And I can see it all laid out before me.   And I would like to weep for my sins when I see them like this.  And how could anyone say that God’s works will be revealed in me, if he only knew what I knew about me, if he could only see what I see with my eyes shut tight, in the dark like this!

Now I think I would like to open my eyes.  But all of a sudden I cannot.  It is as though they have been glued or sewn or taped shut.  I can feel the light, the warmth beyond me, and I only meant this an exercise, a bit of fun to pretend we are blind because it is so easy to pretend, but now, when I would like to escape my sins – so clearly projected on the darkness in front of me – it seems I cannot pry my own eyelids open. 

And I am wondering about you.  Can you see your own sins as clearly as I can see mine?  Can you answer the disciples’ question (Who sinned here?)?  And are your eyes stuck shut in your own peculiar blindness when you think about these things? Are you peeking?  Do you find your sins as hard to escape as I do mine?  And do you find that you would like to weep, but that you cannot?  It is as if our tear ducts have gone dry.

But I realize that the voices are still there in front of me, that I have not been hidden from view even though I thought I was hiding.  The disciples are there, some challenging, others defensive, and the calm, self-assured rabbi is there, too.  And someone – I think it is him -  has stooped down right in front of me, just when I was thinking I wanted to weep for my sins but could not. 

Still, no tears will come, and yet I feel an unusual moisture at my eyelids, and the fingertips of two strong but gentle hands at my temples as the thumbs rub something wet onto my eyelids, which remain mysteriously shut.  And the calm voice says to me, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam.”

Because of our circumstances, I cannot, of course, go anywhere right now, and neither can you.  But with our eyes shut, we can go there in our imagination – to the pool called Sent – we can go where we have been sent.  We can feel its cool waters splash across our faces and begin to un-cake the mud that has already dried around our eyelids.  And we can feel the light fill our eyes, we can open them now and reclaim our sight.

Because you were not born blind, perhaps you thought the Gospel story this morning was not about you.  But you don’t need to have been born blind to know the healing power of Jesus’ love.  Just close your eyes, and let yourself be blind for a little while.  Look into the darkness of your own heart and search for the source of light.

Many of us are our own worst enemies, facing no challenges so great as to how to overcome our own foolishness, selfishness, pride, greed, indifference, and more.  And even though we were not born blind, most of us know what it is like to be caught in our own darkness, convicted by our failures, our losses, the things done and left undone in our lives.  But because the question offended us (Who sinned, this man or his parents?) we have already dismissed the question of the cause of our darkness as so much religious foolishness.  And so we have often come to believe that Jesus’ ministry of binging sight to the blind has nothing to do with us, and we have pretended that the darkness is not there.

But there is a darkness there, where you and I yearn for light.  There is a tiny black hole that seems to suck the energy out of life itself, somewhere in your gut.  Maybe you are certain it is your fault, that you put the black hole there; maybe you think it was someone else’s fault; maybe you don’t know.  I don’t really care, and I’m not sure God cares, though I’m sure God knows.

And God sees us when we would rather hide, just because we cannot see ourselves does not mean God cannot see us – this is a very old lesson.  And he does not want to win the argument about who sinned, about whose fault it is.  He is not really interested in that kind of thinking – in fitting angels on the head of a pin.

But he does kneel beside us, take some of his own spit, and mix it with the dirt, and rub it over our eyelids.  He lets his hands linger there on our heads for a moment, because he knows this is comforting to us: his touch, as we confront the reality of our darkness.

And then he says gently to us, calmly, self-assuredly: Go, wash in the pool where I send you.  And we grope for a little while longer to find the place where we have been sent, and it is still dark.  Until we wash, and discover that behind the mud, God was doing something secret and healing and beautiful.

And I was blind but now I see.  There is light where before there was only darkness.  And now I know that as long as he is in the world he is the light of the world.  And I think we must do whatever we can to keep him here.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

3 April 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

There are plenty of images of disaster and heartbreak to occupy our field of vision these days.  Two stick in my mind:

The first is from a month ago in Christchurch, New Zealand.  A 15 year-old boy and his 18 year-old sister flank their father, all three in tears as they discover that there is no hope of finding the children’s mother alive after the collapse of a building during the earthquake in that beautiful city.  The children’s faces are red and pained, their eyes swollen with tears.  Their father has an arm around each child’s shoulder, his head bowed in grief between them.  They look to me just as ordinary as every teenage child I have ever seen, as every balding, middle-aged father that has ever walked the planet.  Except for their grief, which I would not even begin to try to describe.

The second image is of a pretty 24 year-old woman, named Taylor Anderson, you have probably heard of.  The photo I am looking at shows her smiling beside one of her students, a radiant young Japanese girl of maybe 6 or 7, I am guessing.  They are both wearing colorful kimonos.  Taylor looks like every good-hearted young woman I have ever seen.  She was the first American casualty identified in the earthquake/tsunami in Japan.  I don’t know what happened to the girl beside her in the picture.  I am afraid to find out.

There is an old spiritual that American slaves sang; they cannot have dreamt that it would sing about tragedy in New Zealand or Japan; they cannot have guessed a white boy in a Connecticut prep school would learn it and let it seep into his soul too.  But these things happen.  You have surely heard the old song:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. 

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

A long way from home.

I am not a motherless child.  But I look at those two kids in Christchurch, and I am guessing at the depth of their anguish, the emptiness in their hearts, the hollow ring of any words of comfort.  I am guessing what it feels like to be a motherless child.  Some of you, I am sure, do not have to guess.  Whether by tragedy or old age or estrangement, or who-knows-what, you are a motherless child too.  Maybe your sadness does not look like the sadness of those two children in New Zealand.  Maybe it is duller, more distant, better integrated into your life.  I hope so.  But you know.  Most of us will be there some day – a motherless child - as my own mother has been for more than ten years now.

Sometimes you feel like a motherless child.  Sometimes all seems lost, darkness has eclipsed light, hope is gone, and the sobs that seem to control your body are so relentless that you wonder if they will ever stop.  Is it for this simple reason that when God chose to send his Son into the world, he decided it would be the way every other child comes into it: from his mother’s womb, nursed at her breast, raised at her knee?  And is it for this reason that as he hung dying, one of Jesus’ last acts was to share his mother with his disciple, and I hope and believe, thereby to share her with us, too? 

Is Mary the surrogate mother for all motherless children?  Because God knows that sometimes we all feel like a motherless child, and sometimes that pain is as immediate as the tragic death of a mother – taken too soon from children who cannot really afford to lose her, who should not be asked to bear the loss.  If we are drawn to Mary, as Christ seems to draw us to her, is it for this – because sometimes I feel like a motherless child, sometimes you do? 

Shift your mind’s eye now to Taylor Anderson, who died in Japan and whose mother is now a childless mother – not without any children, but without that one.  If there is any grief to rival that of a motherless child, it is the grief of a childless mother.  I won’t rehearse the various scenarios that bring about this result – each of them its own brand of suffering, its own path through a darkness with so little oxygen it seems impossible to survive.  In this, too, are we linked to Mary – who took her child’s body in her arms as he was let down from the Cross: his blood and breath both drained from him.  And is this how God allows himself to be known to all childless mothers: in solidarity of grief and sorrow, by mingling Mary’s tears with theirs?

There are other griefs to be grieved, other sorrows to be known, other sufferings to endure, other tears to be shed in this world, God knows, a catalogue of them too grotesque to imagine.  But it may be one of the few bits of shorthand that actually says enough, that leaves nothing out - when we reflect on the sufferings of this world, the sufferings of those we love and care about, an on our own sufferings – perhaps it says enough when we say or sing, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

God knows that we feel this way – a motherless child, a childless mother.  And so he sent his angel Gabriel to a girl called Mary, who agreed to be the mother of God’s Son, and thereby to be the mother of us all.  Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

The Annunciation of Our Lord, 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The Judean wilderness where Jesus was tempted by Satan is a desert.  Have a look on Google Earth and you will see nothing but the pale sandy contours of hills there, with the relative green of Jerusalem to the west and the glassy surface of the Dead Sea to the east, so dark and still that the view on my screen reflects the image of the clouds back up to the satellite that snapped the photos.

For some people the desert is a kind of paradise. I think this was not the case for Jesus.  He did not go into the desert in search of a utopian life.  Perhaps he went there to clear his head after the voice from heaven made its proclamation at his baptism (“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”).  He certainly went to the desert to pray, and to rid himself of worldly distractions – a pattern he would follow throughout his short ministry.

The avoidance of worldly distraction must be a part of what drives others into the desert, like a man named John, about whom I read in the paper earlier this week.  He moved from New York City to the desert of west Texas in 2007, 30 miles north of the Mexican border, and 60 miles south of the nearest town, where he lives by himself on a small compound he’s been building with his own hands. 

John lives off the grid, using solar power for electricity, and to bake bread in a solar oven, and to heat the rainwater he collects for his occasional hot showers, which he greatly enjoys.  I suppose it’s the scarcity of water that prevents more frequent showers, and that prompted John to pose this sort of philosophical question: “Do I stink now there is no one here to smell me?”

The Evangelists are silent on whether or not our Lord ever entertained this particular question throughout his forty days in the desert.  But if you’ll allow me some poetic license, may I pose it as a question for all of us, here at the beginning of Lent?  Do I stink if there is no one around to smell me?  Do you?

For a long time the church has had a very clear answer to this question, even though she has seldom phrased either question or answer in this way.  Yes, the church has said, you stink, I stink, we all stink together, no matter who is around to smell us.  To put it theologically: we are all sinners.  The Psalmist, in the great psalm of Lent, puts it this way: “Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb.”  That is to say, I stink, even if you are too far away to smell me, and I always have.  In case you missed it, that same sentiment was basically the theme of the Great Litany we sang together in procession: We stink, even when there is no one around to smell us!  We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord!  Perhaps it is this conviction that explains the use of incense in church – I believe there is historical precedent for that point of view.

If you are the type to think this way, you may be casting your mind back to try to account for how the church arrived at this conclusion, and you may be remembering a certain piece of fruit from a certain tree in a certain storied garden many eons ago.  If you think this way, you are in good company – many thoughtful thinkers have pinned the special way that we humans stink on Adam, who actually didn’t stink until Eve gave him the forbidden fruit to eat, and although the Book of Genesis, doesn’t mention it, I expect that almost the first thing Eve said to Adam after they both bit into the apple was something like, “Honey, please, you stink, go take a shower or something.”

Saint Paul seems to think along these lines when he explains to the first Christians why they stink so bad (“sin came into the world through one man,” he says).  Now, some people think that Saint Paul took this view because he is nothing but a noodge.  But this is a wrong-headed impression of the Apostle who was actually a progressive thinker who challenged the status quo, and wrote as eloquently about the prevailing hegemony of the law of love as anyone ever has.  Far from being a noodge, Saint Paul did not unwind his thought into the doctrine of original sin.  He didn’t spell out the detailed implications of the idea.  He didn’t describe a stain on all humanity as a result of the transgression of Adam and Eve.  What he doesn’t do is focus on the stink.  He takes it for granted that we are stinkers, because this is his experience, not only of others, but of himself.  He knows that even if there is no one around to smell him, he still stinks.

But he knows something more important than this, too.  He knows that as philosophical questions go, this one is only mildly interesting, and operates on a misguided premise: that what’s most important is getting in touch with how bad I stink even if there is no one around to smell me, as if mine was the most important odor around.

So, Paul doesn’t get stuck on the stink.  He is not generally interested in the details of the odor of human failings, the details of sin.  Now and then he brainstorms a list of sins that seem particularly glaring, but when he goes into detail it is only about his own sin, and how impossible it seems to be to escape the smell of it.  He is far more interested in the sweet smelling sacrifice of God, the free gift of Jesus’ offering of himself, the abundance of grace that brings righteousness, justification, that brings salvation, and that ushers in the law of love.

Lent is intended by the church to be a time to lead us out into the spiritual desert, to look honestly at ourselves and our lives, our faults, shortcomings, and failures: our sins.  It is meant to be a time that we can be alone with our own stench without the frequent showers, skin care products, fragrances, and plug-in air fresheners that so easily mask the truth the rest of the time.  It is a time to look at ourselves in the glassy, mirrored surface of the Dead Sea and be honest about what we see, what we smell.

And we start Lent by remembering that when Jesus went into the desert, he had a very different experience than you and me.  When Jesus looks into the Dead Sea, he sees something very different from what we see: he does not see his own reflection, he sees down to the deepest depths of death.  When Jesus sniffs the air around him, there is no scent of his own sin, there is only the smell of cactus and sand, and the salty aroma of the Dead Sea.

And we remember that in the desert Jesus has a run-in with the same force that tempted Adam and Eve with that fruit all those years ago.  And although he is tempted, Jesus does not sin, he does not take what is being offered as though it was somehow better than what God had offered him (“This is my Son, the Beloved”).

And Jesus knows that he is not going to be in the desert for ever, he is thinking still of the Jordan River he left behind and that waits for him while he is in the desert.  And he intends to lead us to that river, because, yes, he can smell us even when there is no one else around, and he knows we need it.

No one likes to be told they stink, but the church has insisted on being frank about this, even in an age, when people are just not willing to listen.  But not wanting to hear it is not the same as being odor-free.  So go find a little desert of your own design some time this Lent; maybe you can find it right in your own room, beside your bed, or at the table, or in a chair that you can sit in quietly and pray, and draw deep breaths, and be honest about yourself, about what you smell.

Ask yourself if the details of that litany we sang are really so far off the mark, even though they are sung with a funny, older accent in church.  Ask yourself if you like what you smell, or if you think you could do better.  Ask yourself if the law that guides you from day to day is the law of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And if you find, from your time in your own desert, that you are wanting, do not decide that as long as no one is around to smell you, as long as no one else knows what you know about yourself, then you don’t really stink.  Because this is simply not true, and eventually the wind will shift, and you will remember the truth.

For we live in a world that too often chooses to believe this sad un-truth, that has decided to simply ignore the stench of our own sins, or worse to believe that our sins don’t stink, which is a delusion of a disastrous kind.

"If you go to your own private desert, maybe you will remember part of the psalm:

Your hand was heavy upon me day and night; my moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not conceal my guilt.

I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.'

Then you forgave the guilt of my sin."

Some time in the desert, off the grid, can be a very good thing for the soul.  If you find it nowhere else this Lent, find it here on Sundays, or come here once a week in the morning or at noon for an hour in the desert with Jesus, who, you will discover, is leading you closer and closer to the Jordan river, where he will wash you, and then you will smell terrific!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

13 March 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

My great-grandmother on my mother’s side lived on a farm in central Connecticut.  She was actually my great-step-grandmother, since my grandmother’s mother died in Europe during the First World War, having left her husband behind in Connecticut when she took my grandmother and her little sister back to Slovakia where they’d foolishly hoped the air would be good for her failing health.  By the time my grandmother and her sister had returned to Connecticut their father was remarried.  Though both my mother’s parents were born in this country, they had both spent time in their childhood in Slovakia, and both spoke English with noticeable accents, as though it was their second language.  My grandmother was “Baba” to me; that made my great-grandmother “Baba-on-the-farm.”

Once when I was a boy of seven or eight during a family visit to Baba-on-the-farm there was a dog tied by a chain to the side of the house, or to a stake, or the garage, or some such thing.  What I remember is that there was a dog and a chain.

I suppose I must have wanted to play with the dog.  I cannot remember if it was especially friendly.  I don’t think it was mean.  The dog must have chased me: dogs do chase little boys; it’s fun.  The dog must have circled around me, because my sole clear memory of that or any other visit to Baba-on-the-farm is that I ended up on the ground, my legs trapped by the dog’s chain wrapped around them, tears streaming down my face. 

I am certain no damage was done.  The dog did not bite me, nothing was broken, I’m not sure I even got scraped up.  But, off-balance, ankles bound together by the chain, I was pulled to the ground.  I was certainly scared.  And boy, was I crying.  And I believe my sister may have teased me, and I think I did not take it well.

Recently my great-uncle George died.  He had lived his whole life on that farm, all alone after his mother, Baba-on-the-farm, died.  The farm will now pass into the hands of my mother and her two cousins.  I don’t believe there has been a dog there for many years.  I know that I was never eager to visit the farm in my childhood; maybe it was because of the episode with the dog and the chain.

I don’t know if you have ever been tangled up in the long chain that tethers a dog to his post, or his doghouse, or whatever.  I don’t know if you had a great-grandmother on a farm, or what the details of your childhood were, but I suspect that you know what it feels like to be off-balance, bound-up, scared, knocked off your feet, with the tears welling (at the very least) or maybe overflowing. 

Sometimes this happens to us and we do not know why.  Other times we know the culprit, or at least we think we do.  Still other times we know that we have done this to ourselves.  Maybe we didn’t mean to do it, maybe we didn’t realize the dog was on a chain, maybe we didn’t think he would chase us, or run around us.  Maybe we thought we were fast enough, agile enough to avoid entrapment in this way, but in the end you are on the ground, feet tangled up, the dog making everything worse, and the tears are flowing – or at least they should be!

Maybe you feel this way tonight, or maybe you have recently.  Maybe you can remember the time you felt this way, but it is now, thankfully, receding into the past.  And maybe in your own story it is not a dog on a farm and a chain, but you know what it is: you know where it happened, what dog was chasing you, what chain you got tangled up in, what you were scared of, what caused you such pain, and brought you such tears.

I know that I have other stories, less benign and harder to share, that have left me feeling the same way: stories in which I am clearly more to blame than the dog, and in which nearly every link in the chain was forged by my own hands.  But these stories, I am not so eager to share with you tonight.

I am moved every Ash Wednesday by how many people want to come to church to receive their smudge of ashes.  People come early, they come at noon, they stop by during they day looking for ashes, and like you, they come late in the day, too.  Denominational lines are easily crossed: Episcopalian ashes are acceptable to Christians of almost any stripe, I’m relieved to notice.  And no one takes up an argument about the words I pronounce as I mark the sign of the cross on their foreheads: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.  For a half a minute or so, at least, this argument seems unassailable.

I believe that those who come asking to wear this mark of mortality for an hour, or a morning, or an evening, do so in part because of the memory of the dogs who have chased them, the chains they have gotten tied up in, the frightened moments they’ve endured as they’ve been knocked to the ground, and because of the tears we’ve shed, especially when we remember that the dog, the chains, the fear were all of our own doing, could have been avoided if we’d been willing to avoid them.  And I believe most of us are willing to wear this little badge of mortality – which is more a badge of shame than of honor – recognizing our own complicity in what’s left us feeling trapped, knocked down, frightened, and crying.

But I am afraid that it is easy to leave church on Ash Wednesday believing that that is all your ashes mean, that having shown up to accept your ashes as a sign of humility, and walking out the church doors with them still on your head, you may believe that the ashes are all you get, along with the not-so-cheery reminder that you are dust and to dust you shall return (an argument that may seem less compelling to you with every step you take away from here tonight, but which will be proven to be true in the end).

Nevertheless, it is not for this sign of your mortality alone that you have been called here.  It is not for this message of cold finality that you have been led here.  There is more.  For God knows exactly what led you to that dog in the farmyard.  He knows whether it was all in good fun, or carelessness, or foolhardiness, or a cocky over-assuredness that got you into this.  God sees just how many turns of the chain have wrapped around your legs, how tight they are becoming, how many twists there are.  God knows how hard you hit the ground when you fell, and he knows that your tears are not just because of this dog, this chain, this fall to the ground, they are for so much more than that; they are for everything that has ever knocked you to the ground before.  And God knows that you feel trapped there in the dirt, with the dog still yapping, and the chain still tightening around your ankles, and you are gasping for breath between your sobs and your secret inner wailings for someone to help you, to stop this damn dog, un-do this chain, and give you a hand.

God has not called you here to tease you, to make you feel silly or stupid or guilty for the things that you have done or that have been done to you that have, from time to time, landed you on your butt in tears.  God has called you here to help you up, to un-bind the chain, to shoo the dog into his corner, and to wipe the tears from your face.  And as God is coming to your side to help you up, he is asking, as I am sure my mother or my grandmother or my father – whichever it was that rushed to my side – must have said to me, “Tell me what happened…?”

And tonight we are asked to use this act of humility to help us tell the truth about all that, to be honest, especially about the things we have done that we shouldn’t have done, and the things we might have done but failed to do.

Because God intends for us all to inherit his kingdom, when we have become nothing but dust in this world.  And the path to that inheritance demands of us an honest accounting of our sins, even as it promises freedom from the weight of them.

So if you came here tonight for the ashes, so be it, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  But if you have honestly and humbly also come here tonight to lay your sins – which have left you trapped, sobbing and dirty – to lay these at God’s feet, begging his forgiveness and asking him to help you get up, then you are leaving with far more than a cross of ashes on your head.  You are leaving as an inheritor of the kingdom of God.  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Ash Wednesday 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia