Saint Mark's Church

Why do you call me good? I’m not really, you know. I’m not bad, either, but I’m not particularly good. But for some reason you seem bound and determined to keep calling me good – the Good Samaritan, with a capital G and a capital S. I’ve become a compound noun, a phrase that’s shorthand for a particular kind of person doing a particular kind of thing. I’ve even become a clause in liability insurance policies and in state law to reassure you that if you’re trying to help someone in a crisis situation and you fail, you cannot be successfully sued or prosecuted. You all use this little phrase so much that it’s started to seem like those two words just go together, good and Samaritan. You realize, of course, that they don’t. At least they didn’t for the people who first heard my story. For them, for the Jews of Jesus’ time, good and Samaritan went together about as well as good and Mets’ fan would for you, or healthy and cheesesteak. No, Jesus’ listeners would have told you that there was nothing particularly good about Samaritans. We had had a serious falling out, you see; we were like first cousins after a family feud, like best friends who decide to try being roommates – we were so close that our differences drove us crazy and finally drove us apart. So the fact that now the phrase Good Samaritan just trips off of all of your tongues is a little shocking. The Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Church of the Good Samaritan. She was saved by a Good Samaritan. Inconceivable.

And why call me good? I’m not so good. I’m just a man who was in the wrong place at the right time. I’m not a saint, for heaven’s sake. I’m not even particularly religious. Sure I go to worship when I need to (on Mt. Gerazim, of course). I make my yearly sacrifices, I keep the Law. But I’m a working man; I don’t have time to sit around debating Torah and asking questions about eternal life. I have to work; I have to walk, to travel around the country selling the wine that my family has made for generations. I am a respectable businessman, a respectable husband and father, but I don’t have a halo, and I’m not some sort of hero.

I do not like traveling the Jericho road. Never have, never will. The people I run across when I make that journey back and forth from Jerusalem are mostly miserable. Especially during the high pilgrim season, when they’re in a hurry, and they’re anxious, and they’re all pushing and shoving and running their donkeys right up the back of your neck. The rest of the year they mostly just ignore you. Most people are so worried about who’s in and who’s out, who’s friend and who’s other, that it’s easier to just pretend like you aren’t even there.

And mostly I ignore them right back, especially Jerusalem Jews. Now don’t get me wrong; I’ve never been openly hostile to the Jews. When some of my neighbors got it into their heads to go to Jerusalem and desecrate the temple by throwing a bunch of old bones around the place, I didn’t go along. I was tempted to, but I didn’t. But I have to admit, when I see the way the way my people are treated – as outcasts, as heretics and lesser-thans – it angers me. So I stick to my own side of the road.

But that anger is nothing compared to how I feel about the robbers. They make me furious, these bands of men who run about this wilderness road stealing and wounding and basically scaring the hell out of people. I’m a large man, with strong hands, and they leave me alone. But I have wished time and time again that one of them would try to rob me, just so I would have the pleasure of beating him up one side and down the other with absolutely no guilt whatsoever. So you see? I’m not that good.

You know, I almost didn’t stop when I saw that guy on the other side of the road. He was such a mess. I couldn’t believe what a pounding he had taken. Every bone in my body told me to just keep my eyes down and my feet moving. You know that feeling. It’s like when you come up on a woman sitting on the pavement talking to herself with a cup of coins in her hand, or a man with greasy hair crying over a cardboard sign that reads, Hungry! Please help. I almost kept walking. The man looked like he might have been dead anyway. But then I stopped and looked at him. I really looked at him. I saw him, naked and bloody and lying in the dust, and suddenly I was full of anger and full of pity all at the same time. Just looking at him made my whole body hurt. I really didn’t want to get involved, but what could I do? I couldn’t just leave his body there for the wind and the wolves. I was starting to ponder if I could get a burial for him down in Jericho if I didn’t even know who he was, when just then, he moaned. Not a lot, just a little, desperate, moan.

And my heart just went out to the guy. I mean, he was really in a rough way. So I went over to him to see what I could do. I don’t know anything about first aid, but I didn’t think any bones were broken. Well, maybe a couple of ribs. But he was bruised from head to toe, with scrapes and cuts where the robbers’ knuckles had torn at his skin. His wounds were red and angry and filthy. Flies were already starting to pick at them. Well, I thought, I can at least clean him up a bit while we’re waiting for someone else to come along. So I poured some of my oil over the cuts to try to get some of the dust out; but that just made things sticky and not very clean. Wine would be better. All I had with me was the wine I was going to sell down in Jericho, and I wasn’t thrilled about wasting a whole wineskin just to wash out the wounds of a guy who was probably going to die anyway, but I saw him lying there, completely broken, and so I broke the seal on a wineskin and poured out some wine. On the open wounds. He didn’t like that much.      

We sat there for a while, him flinching and moaning and muttering about someone named Sarah, me wiping his wounds and waiting for someone else to come along to take him off my hands. Which, of course, no one did. And, well, you know the rest of the story. I shrugged him up on my own donkey, put my pack on my own back, and got him out of there. I cared for him myself until I found someone else who could help. But that’s it. I’m not a Superman. I’m not a Savior. I’m just a Samaritan.

So why do you call me good? You know, Jesus asked that question, too. Why do you call me good? Of course, the person who was calling him good was a sycophantic hypocrite just trying to get in with “the man.” Jesus asked the question because he didn’t want to be flattered. I guess I’m asking it because I don’t want to be flattened. The Good Samaritan. As if calling me “good” explains everything. I’m not perfect, some great example of purity and saintly and noble guy. I’m not a good guy who of course had no other option but to help that man on the road. I’m just a normal guy – a guy like you – who did something, one thing, that was, actually, pretty good. The point of Jesus’ story is not that I am a person of particular virtue, who gets it better than you do, who is innately better, somehow, than you. To say that would be as idiotic as to say that the priest and Levite who walked by earlier are innately evil, or that the lawyer who asked Jesus the question that got this whole thing started was innately selfish or callous. That is hugely missing the point. We’re all just men, people, like you, and what determines whether we’re good or not is what we actually choose to do. What I did wasn’t easy. I didn’t do it because I’m particularly good, and I certainly didn’t do it because I was trying to be “nice.” I just did it, one little step at a time. I did it because I saw this guy and I felt his pain, and I found that I couldn’t just leave it at that. I stepped into his skin, and once I had done that, I just had to help him. I felt compassion for him. Compassion. I was suffering with him, and so helping him was actually helping me, because in that moment he was my brother, my neighbor, a part of my family, a part of myself. He was my responsibility. So if you’re going to call me anything, call me compassionate. The Compassionate Samaritan. The world could use more perfectly normal but wholeheartedly compassionate people doing good things any day of the week, just like I guess the world could use more neighborhood watch programs where people are watching for neighbors instead of for others.

So don’t call me good. I don’t think it’s so helpful, if it makes you feel like I’m good and therefore better than you so why bother. There is only really one who is good. No one is good but God alone. But he is so good, he is so good that he offers us his only Son, the compassionate one, to suffer with us, to die for us, to rise again in great glory, to offer all of us normal folk the glimmer of hope of being compassionate people doing good things. Because that we can do. That we must do. So go and do likewise.

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

14 July 2013

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

There is a story told on seminary campuses of a theology professor who every year would tell his students that they had the option of skipping their final exam if they could complete one, simple requirement: they had to invent a new heresy. Seeing as this professor’s final exams were known for being particularly brutal, every year a handful of students would set about the task of creating their own, fresh new heresy. And every year, they all would fail. No matter what crazy, cockamamie idea they would come up with about the nature of Jesus, or the creation of the world, or the second coming, the professor could always find someone who’d had the same crazy, cockamamie idea twelve hundred years ago. The lesson was a simple one: there is very little, perhaps nothing at all, about the Christian faith that hasn’t already been harmfully twisted by someone. That sounds like bad news, perhaps, but it is not. Because that also means that there is very little, perhaps nothing at all, of that twistedness that the Church hasn’t already put in its place: namely, a large box labeled “Untrue and truly unhelpful.”

And yet, year after year, preachers stand before their congregations with trembling knees on this Sunday, terrified that they are going to spout some new – or old – heresy. Why? Because today is Trinity Sunday, the day when the Church focuses on the great mystery of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This week, my Facebook feed has been abuzz with preachers joking about their struggles with their sermons for today. One of them created a “meme,” essentially a photo with a funny caption, that shows a small, fluffy kitten and reads, “Want to avoid heresy on Trinity Sunday? Forget the sermon and show pictures of kittens instead.” Someone else went so far as to create an animated short of two ginger-haired Irishmen haranguing Saint Patrick for his use of the shamrock as an analogy for the nature of the Trinity. (The heresy there is apparently tritheism – ask me later if you’re interested.)

Now this is all a bit over the top, of course, but there is some real grounding to the fears about preaching on the Trinity. Because the blessed and glorious Trinity is not exactly the easiest theological concept to explain. Heck, forget about explaining it, the Trinity is just hard to talk about. We have a God, one God, revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ, the co-eternal Word, who was made flesh by the Virgin Mary his mother, who prayed to God as his Father, and yet said that he and the Father were one, but then seemed to be abandoned by his Father on the cross, who then after his resurrection promised to send a comforter, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the one who stands beside us, but who seems not to have been just sent, but always been standing beside us, the ruach who moved over the waters of creation, who alighted on kings and prophets, who was present at Jesus’ baptism and in the wilderness, who speaks what he hears of the father and of the Son and reveals to us all truth. Three persons, all God; God who is one.

Obviously the doctrine of the Holy Trinity can easily lead to serious confusion. To simplify things for ourselves, we might start thinking about Jesus as a person, wholly separate from God, or of the Holy Spirit as a kind of force field that Jesus, like some ascended superhero, shoots out of his fingertips from heaven. But if Jesus is just a person, then how did his crucifixion change anything? And if the Holy Spirit is just a watered-down, less-present stand-in for Jesus, then how can He (or She) know enough to reveal anything of the truth? You can see how easily we get tied up here. We need some help. We need some greater understanding, some greater wisdom.

And look what we have here, in Proverbs! "Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?" Huzzah! We are saved. Here is the wisdom we have been seeking. And as we read on, this just keeps sounding better and better. Because this Wisdom isn’t hiding her light under a bushel; no! She is standing out on the street corners, parking herself by the entrance to the PATCO line, or working her way down the outdoor tables that line Rittenhouse Square, offering her insights to all people everywhere. She is ready to share her knowledge, and what a knowledge it is! She was created first at the beginning of everything, present when God hung the stars and the moon, cradled in the crook of God’s arm as he bent to separate the waters, to bring forth dry land, to make mountains and rills and sheep and spiders and begonias and crabgrass…and us! Wisdom was there when we were made, when God breathed life into the first dust man and made for him his very own dust woman. Wisdom has been around long enough to know the truth of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and so we read on, anxious to see Wisdom get down to business, explaining, codifying, enlightening us about this tricky, testy doctrine of the Trinity.

But wait, what is this? When we read on, we find that there is actually no explaining to be found. None at all! It’s crazy making! Here is Wisdom, Wisdom herself, who knows the truth of all that has ever been and ever will be, and when she is presented with the infinity and majesty of the Triune God, she dances. She who knows the intricacy and immensity of all of God and God’s Creation explains nothing. Apparently all she wants to do is dance, to whirl about in wonder. “I was beside him,” she says, “like a master worker;…rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” She offers no explanations, codifies nothing; she just dances before God in joy.

And perhaps here is where we realize an important truth: that today is not really about a puzzle. Of course we will always continue to ponder the mystery of the Holy Trinity. We will always be drawn to the Trinity, running around it in circles as we try to find where it stops and where it starts, trying to sketch out a family tree of who begot whom and who is made from what. We will always try to figure out the Trinity. And that’s fine, we should – some of us should try a little and some of us, with brains more nimble than mine, should try a lot.

But today is not about a puzzle. Today, we recognize that the Holy and Blessed Trinity is not, at its core, something to be figured out. It is not a set of cosmic magic rings that need to be pulled apart and then slid back together. For Trinity Sunday is not really a day to celebrate a doctrine; it is a day to celebrate a God, three persons in one God and one God of three persons. We are here to celebrate persons, not a puzzle, to celebrate the fact that our God is a Trinity of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with whom we actually have a relationship. This Trinity of persons knows us, more than knows us, loves us, delights in us, pours out upon us all of the gifts of Creation, all of the Wisdom of the ages, all of the forgiveness and mercy and love and truth and justice that we will ever need. This Trinity, this great and majestic mystery, is persons and therefore personal. And, most importantly, these persons are for us.

And that just leaves us in absolute wonder. That understanding that God is for us, that the Father chose to pour himself out to you and to me through the revelation of Jesus Christ and by the workings of the Holy Spirit, that Wisdom leaves me openmouthed with awe. Because truly, what other response can there be to this much love? I cannot explain whence it comes. Why does God love us this much? Why does God delight in us, in the human race, when we like to spend so much of our time ignoring Him and crucifying each other? Why? Why so much grace poured out on us who are so undeserving? “When I consider your heavens, O Lord, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars you have set in their courses, what is man that you should be mindful of him? the son of man that you should seek him out?”

But this question seems to provide its own answer, and that is: who knows? Who knows why God loves us so much? Who knows why the glory of the eternal Trinity is offered to us free of charge? Who knows, other than the God who made us? And perhaps we are meant not to know; perhaps we are just meant to see. Perhaps we aren’t meant to explain; perhaps we are just meant to dance, as the very Trinity dances in itself, to rejoice in the Trinity as the Trinity is so obviously rejoicing in us. Perhaps that is what this broken world really, truly needs: not people who can explain their faith, but a community of Christians dancing their faith in gratitude and joy, pointing again and again to the wonderful mystery of the Trinity and saying Wow! Perhaps this is the gift of Trinity Sunday – to remind us that it is enough, enough to rejoice, enough to give thanks, enough to fall to our knees, enough to sing Holy, Holy, Holy, enough to dance.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

26 May 2013 - Trinity Sunday

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

My grandmother always says the same grace before meals. She knows others, I’m sure, but she has only ever said one: Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and grant that all these gifts be blessed. This is Grandmom’s grace, said at every family gathering and on every major holiday, said in the same sweet, melodious voice each time, even if five minutes before this 85-year-old, 5-foot-nothing, bold, beautiful, feisty Italian woman was standing in the kitchen pointing a wooden spoon and railing against Congress or anyone who has ever or will ever play for the New York Mets. But come grace-time, and she’s all softness and light: Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and grant that all these gifts be blessed.

Now as a child, I thought that this grace was a little, well, lame. This is because I was a complete grace snob. In my immediate family, we quoted scripture before mealtime. We had standard grace quotes, like “He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love, or, if you were hungry: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” And if you felt like showing off: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” These verses didn’t always relate directly to mealtime, per se, but they were beautiful, and in their King James English, they sounded awfully official and important. As a child, I was far more impressed with the seriousness of these quotes than with the sing-songy-ness of Grandmom’s grace. Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and grant that all these gifts be blessed, always seemed childish compared to, you know, THE BIBLE.

What I did not realize in my childish snobbery is that the first part of my grandmother’s prayer actually is THE BIBLE. And not only is it from THE BIBLE, it is given privilege of place by being the last prayer in the entire canon of scripture. “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.” Here ends the Bible. Come, Lord Jesus is one of the oldest prayers in Christendom, found not only in Revelation but in one of Paul’s letters and in the first liturgy of the Church. Come, Lord Jesus is a prayer that has been offered over and over by millions of Christians in thousands of places and times. It is the most ancient, the most scriptural, the most important of prayers.

What I also did not recognize as a child sitting at my grandmother’s dinner table was that it is also a hugely ambitious prayer, a prayer of epic proportions. I never stopped to think what we really asking. Come, Lord Jesus. What if Jesus had actually taken us up on our offer? What if he really had come? Well, he certainly would have come in and sat right down to eat, probably in that chair – you know, the extra chair from the study, the low one that makes the dinner table hit you right around here. Jesus would have sat in that lowest chair, probably at the spot in the middle of the table where the crack makes your plate wobble back and forth. Or, more likely, he would have sat at the kiddies table, with his knees tucked up around his chin, just suffering the little children all over the place. He would have cleared the table, stayed in the kitchen drying dishes, recycled the empty cans, driven the leftovers over to the homeless shelter. He would have asked provocative questions about forgiveness, invited unusual people to the table, told daring stories about a kindhearted Mets fan caring for a man who had been beaten up along the road to Citizens Bank Park. He would have challenged us by his words and his actions to truly be his disciples in our words and our actions. He would have come, our Lord Jesus, so that our dinner, and our lives, would never have been the same.  

Come, Lord Jesus is a serious, powerful prayer. It is a bold ask. Because Jesus can come in only one way – the same way he has always come, with the same purpose he has always had. Which means that when we pray this prayer, Come, Lord Jesus, we are really asking for Jesus to come and turn our world upside down. For he came, and so he will always come, to exalt the humble and meek and to fill the hungry with good things. He comes as the master to act as the servant; he comes as the highest to sit with the lowest. He comes as the purest of heart, without sin, to walk among brokenhearted sinners. He comes to manifest the glory of God in the shame of the cross. He comes with great power to give it away for great love.  He comes to shake up the world, to shake us into our right minds, to show us again and again how God rejects the priorities of this world for the grace of his heavenly kingdom.

Now all of that shaking up can be supremely uncomfortable. That’s why this prayer takes so much courage, because it means that we are inviting Jesus to change things, to change us. And that means admitting that we need that change, because sometimes you and I find it easier to adopt the priorities of this world than to fight them. We get sucked in to believing unhelpful, unholy untruths – that our worth is somehow tied to our wallets or our waistlines, that we are loved because we are powerful or perfect, that our sin is justified because of need or expediency, that faster is better, that busier is better. We get sucked into believing that when Christ said to love our enemies he surely didn’t mean dead terrorists, or kidnappers, and that when he said to give away two robes instead of one he surely didn’t mean actual clothes, or at least not our nice ones, and that when he said to serve the poor he must have meant only those who are properly grateful, or clean, or pleasant. In the Church, too, we are often tempted by these worldly priorities, tempted to look to our bottom line as the Alpha and the Omega, or to measure our success only in terms of how many people are sitting in the pews instead of how many hearts – in and out of the pews – are transformed by the Gospel.

Opening ourselves up to admitting these failings and owning our own sin, can be a vulnerable, scary business. True transformation always is. This is why this prayer has always been a prayer of the whole Church, a prayer that we offer together, as one body with Christ in us and us in Christ. Together we can have the courage to lift up our hearts and to cry out Come, Lord Jesus! Come down and shake us up. Come down right in the middle of the world’s lies and speak truth. Come down right in the center of our weakness and comfort – be strong with – us. Come down into our selfishness or apathy to help us love as we should, to help us follow you as we should, to help us wash our robes in whatever sacrifice is required to follow in the path of discipleship. Come, Lord Jesus. This is the boldest and bravest of asks, a serious, important, beautiful prayer.

And it is a prayer that is a gift. Because here is the thing: Christ is coming. He has promised that he is coming and that right soon. He is coming in a thousand little ways, this day and at the last day, to bring justice to places where the strong lord it over the weak, to bring mercy to the sick or the sin-sick souls, to bring peace and love where there is only violence and hardness of heart. Ready or not, here he comes. And Christ just wants us to be ready. So he offers us this prayer. I am the Alpha and the Omega, he says, I am the bright morning star, and I am coming. So get ready, and let everyone who hears say, “Come.” You, say Come! Let everyone who hears the great good news boldly say come. Let the Church and the city say, come. Let the faithful say come. Let the doubters say come. Let the joyful say come. Let the addicted say come. Let the children say come. Let the heartbroken say come. Let the survivors say come. Let the oppressed say come. Let the frustrated say come. Let the grandmothers and the mothers the grandfathers and the fathers say come. Let the angry, the exhausted, the jubilant, the lost, the found, the poor, the hungry say come. Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and grant that all these gifts be blessed. Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

12 May 2013

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Do you know that feeling you get when something big, something wonderful, something long anticipated is now just… over? It’s a feeling we’ve all had at some point in our lives. When we’re children, it’s the feeling of waking up on the morning of December 26, or of shuffling to the car to head home after the trip to the shore or to Disney World. When we’re older, it’s the feeling of waking up to a kitchen full of dishes after a long-prepared-for 60^th birthday party, or walking into an empty house after your daughter and her new wife have gone off for their honeymoon, or, oh, I don’t know, coming back to work after a fabulous post-Easter vacation to Amsterdam, Bruges, and London. You know that feeling – that slightly disembodied, sag in the stomach, oh-so-tired feeling that wraps around you like a heavy blanket. Well, that fun is over, we sigh to ourselves. So what do we do now?

It seems that perhaps the disciples know this feeling, too. For them, Easter morning has come and gone, and the unthinkable, the impossible, the mysteriously, miraculously wonderful had actually happened. They had seen an empty tomb, heard Mary tell of a garden encounter with a man who knew her and called her by her name, and then, then, they had actually seen Jesus standing in the middle of a locked room. They had seen him and he had spoken to them, breathed the breath of the Holy Spirit on them…and then he had come back, spoken words of peace to them once again, showed his hands and his side to poor Thomas. He had come back and done “many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book,” as John the evangelist tells us. Jesus was alive, and he was around; he just kept showing up, performing miracles, speaking words of peace and promise. And his disciples must have been giddy, breathless, as excited as Christmas morning and Disney World and a London vacation all rolled into one.

But now, suddenly, it feels a lot like the morning after. Jesus seems to be gone again. The disciples are alone, gathered around the Sea of Tiberius, just looking at each other. Well, I guess that fun is over, one of them says, sighing. What do we do now? Peter looks out to sea and takes a long, heavy breath. He shrugs. I am going fishing. The others scratch their beards and nod slowly. Okay, they say finally. We will go with you. And they all shuffle over to their long-abandoned boat, feeling that slightly disembodied, sag in the stomach, what-are-we-doing-here feeling, a feeling that doesn’t really go away once they’ve pushed out to sea and lowered their nets. They sit, all night, in the silence, in the dark. Their nets hang down into the inky water, limp and empty. There are no fish and no words, really, nothing to do but just sit there, wrapped in that heavy blanket of morning-after, let-down, all-the-fun-is-surely-over feeling. Huh. What do we do now? And in the darkness and the fog, it’s hard for them to even begin to imagine an answer to that question.  

Thankfully, they don’t have to try to imagine for very long. Because once the sun comes up, there is their answer standing on the shore. There is Jesus, again, calling to them from the beach, telling them, his beloved children, exactly what to do now – cast your net on the other side of the boat, bring me some fish, come and have breakfast, feed my lambs, follow me. Just when they thought that he was gone again, and maybe gone this time for good, Jesus shows up one more time, and in his presence that heavy morning-after feeling is gone just as quickly as it came. And as the disciples stand there with sand between their toes munching on smoky bread and crispy fish, they begin to realize what Jesus is telling them: that morning-after feeling never has to come back. Jesus is inviting them into a way of life where there are no morning-afters, where there is always preaching to do, sheep to feed, a church to build, because there is always a risen Lord to follow. He is inviting them to imagine awaking each morning in happy expectation of something big, something wonderful, something long anticipated to do now, in Jesus’ holy name. No more morning afters. Only mornings before.

Because, you see, there are actually no morning-afters when it comes to faith. The truth and the beauty and the joy of the Gospel that we proclaim is never just…over. It can certainly feel like it sometimes. It feels a little bit like it this morning, in fact. After all, Easter was two weeks ago, the timpani and the trumpets are long gone, the scent of lilies has long ago faded from the air. Easter Day is well and truly over, and it’s easy to feel that kind of morning-after fog, to stare blankly at our dark, empty nets and wonder what we are supposed to do now – here, in the church, here in our hearts. But this morning, Christ is inviting you into a way of life where there are no morning-afters, where the resurrection is not something that happened once upon a time in a land far, far away, where we do not proclaim that Christ was risen but that Christ is risen, that Christ does show up to tell us what to do now.  

Sometimes Christ shows up in our lives to tell us to change something we are doing that isn’t very helpful to us or to our neighbors or to the world. Cast your nets on the other side, Christ says; trust me, do this, make this change and see the abundance of wonders I have in store for you. Sometimes Christ shows up to feed us, in the daily offering of his body and blood, in the spiritual nourishment we find in our prayer or in our service in his name. Sometimes Christ shows up to call us to task, to help us to confess the ways that we have betrayed or ignored him, the ways that we have denied his presence in our lives with or without the telling cock’s crow. Do you love me? he asks, so that we can know – really know – how deeply and how infinitely we are forgiven. And sometimes Christ shows up to call us to act – to feed his sheep, to care for his lambs, to perform our own signs and wonders in the world.

Christ shows up in a thousand little ways – when we’re looking for him and when we’re not, when we’re bright with enthusiasm and hen we’re wrapped in a thick morning-after blanket, when we’re confident about our futures and when we’re stumbling about looking for a boat to go fishing. Christ shows up in unexpected places and in unexpected ways to help us see what to do now, to help us see this as the morning before, the dawn of something new and challenging and wonderful in our lives.

And this assurance of Christ’s presence can sustain us through all of the other morning-afters of life – and not just the little ones, like after the vacation, or after the birthday or the family visit, but also the monumental, world-rocking ones, like after your mother dies, or after you lose your job, or after you discover the depth of your sister’s illness or her addiction. Because in all of these morning-afters, Christ shows up, again and again. Christ’s constant presence assures you that there is always more to come, even on those mornings when you find yourself heaving that deep sigh and experiencing that slightly disembodied, sag in the stomach, heavy blanket feeling, when you find yourself raising your eyes to the heavens and asking, “What do I do now?”

What do you do now? Look to the shoreline. Not so far away, really, only just there on the horizon. Find that familiar figure who stands before you, who encourages you to try casting your eyes and your hopes on the other side, on his side. Listen to him as he calls you to his table to eat, as he calls you to repentance so that he can offer the forgiveness you seek, as he charges you with the charge of divine love – feed my sheep. Follow me. Follow me and see that something big, something wonderful, something long anticipated – something holy, something eternal, something intimate, something transformative and wondrous and full of joy comes in the morning. For Christ is risen, and there is something, someone, to look forward to, and something for us to do now, here, on this great Easter morning before.

Back when I was teaching high school choir, I used to spend a part of every summer participating in a Bach festival at Westminster Choir College. This festival was a chance for professional and amateur singers to come together to learn a major choral work of Bach – one of the Passions, a grouping of cantatas, or even the B Minor Mass – and then to offer a public performance with a group of top-notch soloists and instrumentalists. These were always wonderful weeks spent with the best people in the world: namely, people who love nothing more than spending 8 hours a day singing Bach. Those of us who were actually being paid to do this enjoyed ourselves so much that we did it for very little money and always ended up helping with administrative duties as well.

One year, the year we were learning the Bach St. John Passion, I ended up proofreading the program, which, if you know me at all, you know is right in my wheelhouse. The program included the entire text of the Passion in both German and English that had been typed in word by word by some poor summer intern in the continuing education department. This was before the days when you could just go online and copy a text like this as a whole, so this poor intern was typing and tabbing, tabbing and typing, German and English, English and German, for pages and pages and pages, which would drive anyone a little bit crazy.

And let me tell you, the proofreading wasn’t particularly fun, either. I ended up proofing for an entire day of rehearsal, looking at a few lines at a time during any free moment, like during someone else’s aria or a longish conversation about Baroque bowing technique. By lunch, my eyes were bleary from passing over the same phrases again and again, passages like this, like a script: Evangelist: Pilate asked, Pilate: Are you the King of the Jews? Evangelist: Jesus answered: Jesus: Is that your own idea, or have others suggested it to you? Evangelist: Pilate answered: Pilate: Am I a Jew? Your own people and their chief priests have handed you over to me.

But then suddenly, unexpectedly, in the middle of my proofreading, there was this: Evangelist: Pilate asked, Pilate: What have you done? Evangelist: Jesus answered: Jesus: HI!! J …printed all in capital letters with two exclamation points and a smiley face. I couldn’t help it – I burst out laughing in the middle of some poor baritone’s solo and completely interrupted the rehearsal. Jesus answered, HI!! J All these years later, I’m still not sure how this HI!! J got in there. I’ve always imagined a poor intern, eyes crossed from typing, stumbling away from her desk in search of strong coffee, and one of her fellow interns tiptoeing over to her terminal to type in a little note to cheer her up. HI!! J But the first intern wasn’t able to find any caffeine or sugar during her sanity break, and when she came back to her computer, she completely missed the message. And so we ended up with Jesus answered, HI!! J Thank God it didn’t make it into the program. The poor bass singing the part of Jesus would never have known why everyone started giggling during his dramatic recitative.

Of course, if that line had made it into the program, people might have thought that they had just been transported ahead three days and into the Gospel of Matthew. Because it’s true that right in the middle of Matthew’s resurrection story, Jesus suddenly and unexpectedly shows up and says, HI!! J, maybe even with two exclamation points and a smiley face. Of course, our translation tonight says “Hail” and some others say “Greetings” or even “Good morning” but the idea is the same – Hey Mary, Hey Mary…HI!! J

This, dare I say, perky greeting is a surprise particularly because Matthew’s resurrection story is surely the most dramatic of them all. There is no peaceful, pre-dawn tomb here. There are no women laden with spices stepping quietly through the garden only to arrive at the tomb to find the stone already rolled away and an angel serenely perched upon it. No, the women in Matthew’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, seem to have gone to the tomb to spy, not with spices. They are sneaking about on a covert mission to see how many guards there are and whether or not they seem to be doing their jobs when WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly the earth is roaring and rumbling like thunder, an angel shoots down out of the sky like a bolt of lightning, so bright that it hurts their eyes, and they can barely stand to look at him as he takes the giant stone and hurls it away from the tomb with a heave and a crash and thud. The guards just pass out. The shining angel speaks to the women in a voice that rattles their eardrums, Fear not! he says – an address which always indicates that the addressees must look pretty darn fearful – Fear not! Jesus is risen, look inside the tomb, he is not here, he has gone ahead to Galilee. Go, go tell the disciples what is going on and where to find him! For I have said so. Let it be written, let it be done!

Now somehow, miraculously, the women do not pass out, nor do they just run away screaming like the ladies in the Gospel of Mark. No, they actually have enough presence of mind to do what the angel asked them to do. They scurry along down the road, scouting for some disciples to report in to – Jesus is risen, there’s an angel sitting on the tomb, and everybody needs to get to Galilee. They’re running, panting, blinking and rubbing their eyes, wondering how in the world they’re going to convince Peter that this wasn’t just a vision brought on by lack of sleep when WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly Jesus is standing right in front of them. And Jesus says, HI!! J Two exclamation points and a smiley face.

It is a wonderful, unexpected, gift of a moment. Jesus isn’t supposed to be there at all – the angel said that Jesus was going on ahead of them to Galilee, not sneaking up behind them on the road to Galilee. But there he is, very much in the flesh, popping up just to say hi. It is as if he cannot wait to see them, that he is bubbling over with the joy of the surprise, that he is giddy and breathless with the wonder of it. HI!! J

This is a particularly appropriate reading for the Easter Vigil, because the liturgy tonight has been a lot like this. This is surely the most dramatic service of the entire Church year. We light a big fire in the church, for goodness sake! We sit in red glow of that fire, holding our own tiny flames, and then are plunged into to darkness, where we hear haunting, ancient prayers and words about floods and freedom and dry bones being knit together; we bless water with smoke and breath and plunge a truly giant candle into the depths of the font – it is all swirling darkness and light and mystery and litany and then WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly the lights flash on and Alleluias are sung higher and higher and higher bells ring and the choir sings Glory be to God on high and the rafters seem full of the flapping of angels, too glorious and bright to look at. It is a surprise, a glorious, wondrous surprise, like Jesus just cannot wait any longer to tell us that it is truly Easter and so jumps up behind us with a grin and says HI!! J Two exclamation points and a smiley face.

And do you know the real joy of this? Jesus does this all the time. He is forever popping up in unexpected places in our lives with words of new life, comfort, and joy. The truth is that the risen Christ just cannot get enough of you – he cannot wait for you to make it down the road to find him, because after all sometimes we get lost and sidetracked and find ourselves wandering down side paths where the valleys are not exalted and the rocks and hills not made low and we begin to forget what it is we’re looking for in this valley of darkness when WHAM! BLAMMO! Suddenly, Jesus is there, meeting us along the way, popping up when we least expect it, just to say HI!! J I am risen, I am here, and I am yours. So go on down the road, for you will surely again see me up ahead. I cannot wait to surprise you again, surprise you with new life, with my love, with my constant presence, with my longing, longing, longing, to surprise you with my joy just in seeing you coming. So HI!! J Happy Easter!! Two exclamation points and a smiley face indeed.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Great Vigil of Easter, 30 March 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia