Saint Mark's Church

Of Jesus’ childhood, the scriptures provide a report for only three days, when he was separated from his parents, and eventually found sitting with the rabbis in the temple.  So we know that he was a religious child.  But although holy writ does not record it anywhere, I think we can be assured that from time to time, the boy Jesus played games.  One such game he might have played with his friends after Hebrew School, and could have been called, “A New Commandment.”  It was, in fact, a learning exercise, to help memorize the 613 mitzvot, or commandments, of Jewish law.  The trick of the game was to call out something that might or might not be a commandment and see if you could fool your friends.

You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge? Old commandment!

You shall not eat a worm found in an apple?  Old commandment.

A younger brother must make the bed of his older brother in the morning?  A new commandment!

You get the idea.

Even as a boy, Jesus had a way of throwing a curveball into the game.

You shall pay your hired servant on the day of his labor?  Old commandment!

You shall forgive your sister or your wife or your mother even if she troubles you?  A new commandment!

You shall not eat the flesh of an ox that has been condemned to be stoned?  Old commandment!

You should love your enemies and pray for them?  A new commandment!

We Christians are somewhat stupefied by the idea of governing our lives by a body of 613 commandments.  Most of us had to learn to remember only the Ten Commandments when we were young, and, in truth, we generally find even those a struggle.  It is no longer clear to us why you should not boil meat in milk or wear garments that are made from a blend of linen and wool.  Our few Jewish friends who keep kosher (if we have any at all) are something of a quaint mystery to us.

Episcopal tradition, as we have received it, is blissfully free of commandments.  Try to name one thing that is required of you day-in –and-day-out in order to be an Episcopalian – I dare you.  This is not a complaint, it is just a comment – we are not much into commandments, and perhaps with good reason: commandments don’t sell very well, these days.  Americans these days do not want to be told “thou shalt” any more than they want to be told “thou shalt not.”

Jesus himself was not very big into commandments as his ministry matured.  He had a penchant for re-imagining or circumventing the traditional Jewish mitzvot (depending on your point of view).  He left behind no written set of rules.  And the one commandment he did give his followers was this: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."  Of course, it has been the long tradition of the church to ignore this commandment (or to re-imagine or circumvent it, depending on your point of view).

In fairness, as commandments go, this one is a bit vague.  What does it mean to love one another?  Strangely, it is immensely easy to disagree about this.  Are we to understand “just as I have loved you” to mean that we should imitate Jesus in the way we live our lives?  If so, what does this mean?  Did he wear linen mixed with wool?  Did he boil meat in milk?  Did he forgive his brothers and sisters, or did he ignore them?  Where did he stand on gun control, or abortion, or gay rights, or the treatment of enemy combatants held in distant places?  How can we apply the injunction to love to these difficult matters?  Are we meant to?

When you think about it, it might be easier to be governed by 613 mitzvot than to have to somehow figure out what this one commandment means.  After all, it’s not so hard to understand this commandment: “You shall not shear the firstling of your flock.”  It’s easy to wear fringes on your clothes and know you are in compliance with God’s law.  But how do we show everyone that we are Jesus’ disciples by loving one another?  Doesn’t love have a way of making up its own rules?  And aren’t there far more than 613 ways for people to show that we love one another, some of them complicated, and some even a little weird?

I sometimes imagine that on the evening of the Last Supper, Jesus’ disciples were indulging in childish reminiscence and playing “A New Commandment” with each other, letting off steam as they prepared for the Passover after an exciting and confusing few days in Jerusalem.

Jesus remained quiet, an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile on his face as his friends made silly suggestions of new and outrageous mitzvot: you shall not feed a multitude of five thousand with only five loaves and two fishes, they laughed among themselves.  You shall not set the Lord’s messiah on a donkey to bring him into Jerusalem, and strow branches in his path as you sing, Hosanna in the highest!” they smirked with one another.

Interrupting his own silence and their game, Jesus gets up from the table and begins quietly to wash the feet of his disciples, much to their amazement and confusion.  And after supper, picking up on their game, he tells them this: “A new commandment I give to you: that you love one another, even as I have loved you.”  But this is not funny.  This is not a game.  The first part of the commandment is not new at all – that you should love one another – it’s straight from the law, already a mitzvah.  So it’s the second part of the commandment that is new – as I have loved you.  Love one another as I have loved you.

Did they wonder as much as we do about how to let this commandment guide their lives?  Or was it clearer to them because of what he’d done with them, how he’d been with them, what he’d already taught to them?

Did they see that living out this new commandment would mean being guided by a few questions?

Can you wash someone’s feet with it?  A new commandment.

Can you feed a hungry belly with it?  A new commandment.

Can you heal someone with it?  A new commandment.

Can you forgive someone with it?  A new commandment.

Can you restore, renew or redeem someone with it?  A new commandment.

Contrast these questions to some others:

What does it prohibit?  Old commandment.

How can you be sure it’s pure?  Old commandment.

What ancient enmities does it preserve?  Old commandment.

Whose privilege of power does it protect?  Old commandment.

Jesus did not say what to do about the old commandments, except that he said that it was not his ministry or intention to disrupt one jot or one tittle of the old law, but to fulfill it.

Isn’t it odd how appealing the old commandments can be?  Isn’t it funny how often we allow our lives and our religion to be governed by those old questions:

What is prohibited in this church?

Who is pure and worthy in this church?

What ancient enmities must we preserve in this church?

Whose privilege and power must be protected in this church?

I don’t know, maybe those questions have some value.  But they lack the power to identify us as followers of Jesus.  For that, you need the new commandment of love.  For that, you need to ask, “Who’s washing who’s feet?”  It is surprising how easily the old questions melt away when you are washing someone else’s feet.

We live in a complicated and sophisticated age, in which we are faced with many perplexing matters.  I suppose it would be too simple to suggest that all we have to do as Christians is to learn to love one another – because to say that is somehow not saying enough, and the semantics of love are themselves complicated and sophisticated.  But if we need a test by which we might know how closely we are hewing to Christ’s new and only commandment, perhaps it is this: Who’s washing who’s feet here?

It is hard to nurture old hatreds when you kneel to wash someone’s feet. 

It is hard to count the number of bullets in a magazine (too many?  too few?) when you are washing someone’s feet.

It is hard to be critical of someone’s sexual orientation when you are washing her feet.

It is hard to feel self-righteous when you are washing someone else’s feet.  (Well actually, it’s not, but that just goes to show you how easily we can pervert nearly anything, including this test of love!)

Jesus did not give a new commandment because he thought the 613 mitzvot were too many to worry about.  He gave a new commandment because the ancient law was one commandment short.

So he girded himself with a towel, and he got down on his knees, and he began to write the new commandment of love with water and sweat, and the stink of dirty feet.  And he must have known that it would be difficult for us to follow this new commandment.  So by his service to those who should have been serving him, he posed the question by which we might test our faithfulness to the new commandment: Who’s washing who’s feet?  A question so simple, even a child can answer it.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 April 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.  (John 10:27-28)

A long time ago when kids still played games like Simon Says, and Red Rover for real entertainment, and actually to pass the time, most of us also participated at least once, but probably more often than that, in an egg carry race – maybe at a school fair or a church picnic or something like that.  I expect that these pastimes have been replaced by other activities that are engaged on the Internet, but perhaps by the grace of God I am wrong about that, and children are still sometimes sent outside to play.

In any case, the rules of the egg carry (or the egg-and-spoon race, as it is sometimes called) remain simple: competitors are each given a spoon to hold, onto which an egg is placed, and they have to race to the finish line without dropping the egg.  Sometimes the race is run as a relay.  In the advanced version you put the handle of the spoon in your mouth and carry the egg that way.  Mothers believe that this race should be run using hard-boiled eggs.  Bolder children, especially boys, prefer the idea of using raw eggs that will crack and splat if dropped, bringing some of the thrill of the egg toss to the somewhat less treacherous egg carry.  I suppose it can work either way.

Games with eggs, like the egg carry and the egg toss, are played almost entirely for fun; they are not meant to impart life lessons, and they almost certainly are not meant to convey theological truths.  If stretched these games may teach simple lessons about fragility and risk.  The challenge of the egg carry is that it is difficult to balance an ovoid object (with or without a liquid center) on the end of a spoon.  Eggs will be dropped, and broken, but life goes on.  After all, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, don’t you?  Eggs are essentially disposable objects in American culture, their original galline function as the capsule of new life notwithstanding.

By way of contrast to the egg carry, there is the deliberately didactic exercise posed to high school students in some schools of caring for an “egg baby” (as they are called) as though it were your own infant child.  This exercise is, I think, generally intended to discourage teenagers from advancing too quickly toward parenthood.  The egg babies (also normally hard-boiled) are fragile and easy to neglect, and therefore represent a consummation devoutly not to be wished, to borrow an old phrase.  Perhaps caring for an egg baby is really not so different from the egg carry – just the same thing in slow motion.  In both cases, eggs are going to be broken, it’s largely a question of how many and how quickly.

You can learn a lot from an egg.

It is startling how often and how regularly these days we are jolted into the painful recognition that life is risky and fragile, and sometimes seems as nearly likely to be broken as an egg carried on the end of a spoon.  This past week it was Boston, near the finish line of the marathon, and the smallest egg, the most adorable, and innocent, and fragile egg on that dreadful day was an eight-year-old boy named Martin Richard.

I know the tiniest bit, from spending time in the company of my twin nephews, who will turn eight this summer, how caring for children can seem like an egg carry.  Some parents are more adept at it than others, some more or less anxious, some better resourced than others, and some children are more fragile than others, some more hard-boiled.  But what can a parent, or an uncle, or a friend, or even an innocent by-stander do when someone is intent on knocking your egg off the spoon, or worse yet, blowing it to bits with a homemade bomb?

You look at the face of this child, as we looked at the faces of the youngsters so recently killed in Newtown, Connecticut, and you know that this is not a game, but that life is every bit as risky and fragile and precious – only ten-thousand times more so – as that egg you used to try to carry all the way to the finish line.  And the lesson we seem to be being taught is similar to the lesson we learned at the school fair, the church picnic: eggs will be broken, and there isn’t always anything that you can do about it.  But that lesson, translated to account for the life of an eight-year-old boy is now neither benign nor commonplace; it is tragic and heart-breaking in the extreme.

A person of faith might well ask why God has allowed things to develop this way.  A parent who accepts the risk of raising her child – her egg on the end of a spoon – might ask why bullies are allowed to knock her egg off the spoon for no good reason?  Why they are allowed to shoot at her egg with high-powered weapons?  Why her egg was attacked by disease in the first weeks of his life?  Or why, no matter how carefully she swaddles her egg with protection, it will always be susceptible to shrapnel?

And anyone who is truthful with you about religion will tell you the only honest answer to those questions: Nobody knows.  Nobody knows why life is as risky and fragile as an egg being carried on the end of a spoon in a race to the finish line.  And nobody knows why God allows so many of his eggs to be cracked, scrambled, smashed, ruined, broken to bits, even though they are the works of his own hands.

But if God does not provide the answers we want, he is not entirely silent, either.  “Horatio,” says God (channeling Shakespeare) “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Or, as the prophet Isaiah put it another way, speaking for God, when he wrote, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”  I should hope not.

We overheard some of God’s thoughts in the Gospel reading today:  “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

“No one will snatch them out of my hand, for your ways are not my ways," says the Lord.

God knows how like an egg carry life can seem to us.  Lest we should doubt this, he sent his Son into the world with the expectation that he would be reviled, beaten, shamed, and killed – in a show of solidarity with all those who are at the riskier, more fragile end of life’s spectrum.

Although this is almost certainly not what the writer of John’s gospel was getting at when he was writing, it is my hope that in some ways that writer misunderstood things that Jesus said.  And part of the message of Jesus’ teaching, and of his death and resurrection is this: Eggs are easily broken in your hands, my children, but no one will snatch them out of my hand.

No one will snatch them out of my hand.

We often speak sentimentally about being held in the palm of God’s hand, and this image remains only sentimental until we remember how risky and fragile life is in our own hands – indeed, how much life is like being balanced on an end of a spoon, clenched between someone’s teeth, while others try to knock you off the spoon with one or another explosive device.

We get to the end of a week like this one and there are broken eggs all over the place – blood spilled, limbs shorn off, and life taken, just like that – and what hope is there that next week will not be just another egg carry in which the riskiness and fragility of life are tested again?  More poignantly, what words of comfort or consolation can be spoken to the injured and grieving parents of Martin Richard, whose son has just been snatched violently out of their hands?

Words of comfort and consolation are few in times like these, and many of those offered are cheap, as well.  Those worth saying include this assurance from the Lord of Life: No one will snatch him out of my hand.  This is God’s promise to us egg-carriers in a risky and fragile world.  For Christ has already taken that fragile, easily broken egg and swaddled him in protective wool – just like the kids swaddling their egg babies with tissue paper and cotton balls. 

Thus clothed, the egg has now been dubbed a lamb by Jesus, who is teaching him the sound of his voice, singing him gentle songs, I imagine, to soothe the transition into his new life.  And he speaks the words in truth that every parent wishes they had the power to make true: “No one will snatch you out of my hand. No one.”

Faith in Jesus does not always provide answers to life’s difficult questions, like why life is so easily compared to a children’s game in which eggs are bound to be broken.  But faith in Jesus does bring with it this promise: No one will snatch you out of my hand.

There are those, of course who will try, and they may do so armed to the teeth.  But the Lord is your shepherd, and though you are fragile as an egg, you have been dubbed a lamb, too, in his eyes.

Each of us is riding through this life, cradled gingerly in the shallow bowl of a spoon, so often exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  And we discover, as we grow older, that even by taking up arms against a sea of troubles, we cannot, in this difficult and violent world, by opposing end them.  Which is why it is good news to discover that we fragile eggs have all been dubbed lambs, that the Lord is our shepherd, and that no one will snatch us out of his hand. 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 April 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

If faith is like a walled garden, then the garden wall has many gates that allow both entry and exit.  Most of the gates swing open and closed pretty easily, and the latches operate smoothly.  But there is one gate in the Garden of Faith that is much harder to open – especially from inside the garden.  It is a gate made of thick, heavy wooden planks, with sturdy iron hinges.  There is no lock on the gate – it is meant to be opened and closed if anyone wants to - and it can never be barred.  But inside the garden, thorny bushes have grown up in front of the gate to make it harder to use.  And the letters carved into the sign that is nailed to the gate tell you its name: Doubt.

Doubt is the gate through which we are so often warned we should not pass.  Over the centuries there have been many reasons that this is so, one of which is the story of Doubting Thomas, and Christ’s injunction to Thomas that “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

In our own day, Doubt is a not-much-used gate because the discourse of faith doesn’t seem to allow for much grey area theses days – either you believe fervently and defend your faith ferociously, or you are a happy and satisfied atheist – or so it seems.

If you live inside the Garden of Faith – or if you even just tend a plot of ground there from time to time – the gate of Doubt probably seems dangerous to you.  To begin with, you are not absolutely certain that if you were to go outside the garden through the gate of Doubt that you could ever get back in.  There are lots of other gates that you know are meant to open from both sides – the gates of Sin and Repentance, for instance.  The Forgiveness and Mercy that grow inside the garden of faith give assurances of this – you can always get back in.  But if you were to use the gate of Doubt, then you would be dabbling in something that might keep you outside the garden of faith for the rest of your life.

If you creep up to the garden gate of Doubt late at night and listen carefully, you can hear the voices on the other side whispering questions:

“What if your prayers mean nothing and no one ever answers them?”

“What if there is no God, and the forces that control the universe neither love you nor care about you in the slightest?”

“What if all your silly worship is worthless, self-indulgent pageantry?”

“What if death is all there is at the end of life, and our bodies just become food for worms?”

The voices that whisper these questions on the other side of the gate of Doubt do not sound friendly.  And because you like the time you spend inside the garden of faith, you don’t think you want to entertain these voices and their questions; I know I don’t.

So we have learned to steer clear of the gate of Doubt; we just don’t go there.  There are plenty of other lovely sections of the garden of faith, and there are so many creative and interesting ways to open the gate of Sin when we want to foray outside the garden, that we don’t really need to bother with Doubt.  And, after all, we are assured that on the other side of the gate of Sin there is always the gate of Forgiveness to get back into the Garden.  So we leave Doubt alone.

Having left the gate of Doubt alone so long and so carefully, we seldom look around its vicinity, and we don’t notice that creeping over the wall from the other side of the gate of Doubt are two vines that have become intertwined with the thorny bushes that grow in front of the gate inside the garden.  These vines are invasive and threaten the indigenous plants of the garden of faith; they are Fear and Self-Doubt.  They cleverly present themselves in the vicinity of Doubt as though they were Doubt itself, but they are, in fact, distinct species all their own.  And the flowers of these two vines each has a scent – not entirely unpleasant, but not enticing either – something only just noticeable that is carried in the air beyond the gate of Doubt when the breeze is blowing strongly enough.  And the Scent of Fear and Self-Doubt tickles our noses and plants still other ideas in our heads, as though they were sneezes trying to get out:

“You are ugly and stupid.”

“You will never be good enough.”

“It would be better to play it safe.”

“You can’t do that: someone smarter, and stronger, and more capable than you could, but you can’t.”

These thoughts are borne on the scent of Fear and Self-Doubt, which catches us unawares from time to time, and it has the power to stop us in our tracks and leave us frozen for a while, unable to decide what to do, how to live, convinced that we have no good choices in our lives.  We imagine that these feelings are crises of faith, coming, as they do, from the vicinity of Doubt, and we remember that we have trained ourselves to steer clear of Doubt.  And we do not notice how unsteadily we are now walking in the Garden of Faith, having breathed in the scent of Fear and Self-Doubt.

The Tradition of the Garden of Faith tends to overlook the invasive species of Fear and Self-Doubt, because those vines have become all mixed up with the Gate of Doubt – where you shouldn’t be hanging out anyway!  And so we are not conditioned to identify the effects of the scent of Fear and Self-Doubt in our lives hence we have no idea what to do about it.  Instead, we just tell ourselves that it is all just a part of Doubt and the sooner we get away from the Gate of Doubt the better we will be – wasn’t that the message to Doubting Thomas, after all?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe, you sniveling doubter who has been lingering around gates you know you shouldn’t linger around!

But for a few days of the year – right around this time of year – there blossoms in the Garden of Faith a tiny little plant that carpets the garden with its little, golden blossoms in such a way that the lawns of the Garden of Faith put the Yellow Brick Road to shame, so abundant and so radiant are these tiny blossoms that seem to weave themselves into a seamless garment.  These little blossoms also have a scent – it is at once reassuring and invigorating – and the scent of these flowers has that unusual quality, found in and around the Garden of Faith, that it brings not only odor to our notice, but also sound.

These blossoms are called Thomas Flowers, because when their scent fills the garden with its perfume, it is accompanied by a sound that at first sounds like an army of cicadas making their incessant chirping noise over and over again.  But when you listen closely, at this time of year, when the Thomas Flowers are covering the ground in the Garden of Faith as far as they eye can see, you can hear in the cicada-like chirping the sound of a prayer being made over and over again: “My Lord and my God!  My Lord and my God!  My Lord and my God!”  And by a strange coincidence the sound of that chirping prayer is heard nowhere more clearly than in the vicinity of the Gate of Doubt.  And for reasons that no botanist has ever been able to explain, for about a week or two around this time of year, the vines that grow on the other side of the wall, outside the Garden, by the Gate of Doubt shrivel and die back so that they look like a few dying twigs that are at last being gotten rid of.

But after just a few short weeks, as the last golden blossoms of Thomas Flower are fading from the grass, and the sound of their chirping prayer is becoming faint (My Lord and my God!  My Lord and God!) a shoot begins to grow at the base of the vines of Fear and Self-Doubt, and you can be assured that they will soon be creeping over the wall again.

And the first lesson of the Garden of Faith is this:  There is nothing to be afraid of at the Gate of Doubt except those invasive species of Fear and Self-Doubt that grow on the other side of the gate, and would be happy to keep you there.

And the second lesson of the Garden of Faith is this: That God is able to carpet the landscape with flowers that will proclaim him Lord, and that the beauty of the Thomas Flowers and the majesty of their marvelous prayer (My Lord and my God!) will continue to bloom, causing Fear and Self-Doubt to shrivel, allowing the flowers’ prayer to hang in the air with new music at every chirp:  My Lord and my God!  My Lord and my God!  Thank you for overcoming my fear and self-doubt, my Lord, and my God!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

7 April 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.  (Luke 24:11)

The other day I sat in on a discussion at St. James School with a handful of our 5th and 6^th grade students there and a fairly well-known author.  We sometimes have visitors who come to speak to the students about their pursuits and accomplishments.  We’ve had an Olympic rower, an IronMan triathlete, and the head of a local private school, among others, and most recently this author who is a writer of short stories.  He talked with the students about how you tell a story, and he suggested that first you start with an interesting idea – for instance, let’s say there is a dog who has two heads, that’s interesting.  Next, he suggested, you start to ask questions about the dog with two heads: how did the dog get two heads?  The kids offered their own questions, too.  Do the two heads like each other?  Does one head of the dog try to eat the other head’s food?

Right, said the author, and what happens next?  This question, he told us, is crucial because, of course, it’s what keeps the story interesting, and a story that people will read is a story that continues to get interesting, where the stakes keep getting higher.

Boring stories never go anywhere – maybe you have a friend, like I do, who likes to tell stories that never seem to go anywhere.  They start well, and you are listening, waiting for him to get to the good part, but the good part never comes, the stakes never get higher, and soon your interest wanes, because nothing happens next.  It is an idle tale.

St. Luke tells us that the disciples first greeted the news of the resurrection as though it was an idle tale.  I take it that this could mean a couple of things.  To begin with, it could mean that the story is just untrue – a lie.  And I think that probably many who heard the news that the women brought back from the empty tomb assumed just that – it is a lie.  But even after some of the details of the story are verified – Peter goes to the tomb and finds it just as the women reported – the possibility that the story of Jesus’ resurrection is an idle tale remains, because the question remains, what happens next?  And if nothing much happens next, then it is still more or less an idle tale.

If this question was pressing to those who first learned the good news of the resurrection, then it is no less pressing to us today.  Is the Gospel if Jesus an idle tale or isn’t it?  Is it a lie – as many these days contend that it is?  And, even if the tomb was empty and Jesus was raised from the dead, so what?  What happens next?

Well, we know what happens next in some ways: Jesus hangs around for forty days, St Paul tells the story to anyone who will listen and the church grows, Constantine legitimizes the faith and the church expands, Eastern and Western Christians fight over minutia and the church splits in two, Martin Luther has a hammer and he isn’t afraid to use it when there is a nail and a door around, Henry VIII has a mistress and he isn’t afraid to marry her (as long as he can get a divorce!), and so on and so on and so on.

And all of those are good stories, and many others – BUT, they still could be idle tales to YOU, if you can’t answer the question in your own life: what happens next?  Because, let’s face it, in life the stakes are always getting higher – more is on the line today than it was yesterday, for most of us.  So if the story of Jesus, and the news of his resurrection isn’t any more than an idle tale, who’s got time for it?

OK, maybe you were baptized long ago when you were an infant, but you can’t remember a thing about it – what happened next?  Maybe nothing happened.  Maybe there was a brunch and then you had your second birthday, and you grew up, and nothing happened next, and you haven’t given it a second thought since then.  In this case, so far the whole thing may seem to you like an idle tale.

But maybe the story unfolded in a different way.  Maybe when you were a kid you got very, very sick.  Maybe you were in the hospital.  Maybe they didn’t know if you would make it.  Maybe your mom and your dad went to bed every night with tears on their pillows offering the only prayer they could: Please God, make her well, let her live!  Please, let what happens next be OK!

And maybe, through the skill of doctors and the care of nurses you survived that childhood illness, that’s what happened next.  I know people who this has happened to, I bet you do too.

Maybe when you got older you had a great time, you were the life of every party, but then you discovered that partying was starting to control your life, not the other way around.  And maybe this cost you your health, and your sanity, and your friends, and your job, and your money, and nearly everything as you slipped deeper and deeper into addiction.

But maybe one day it dawned on you that your life was out of control, and you could not control it, you had no idea what would happen next, but all the options seemed pretty poor, and the only thing you could do was to hand over the reins to God and ask him to take over your life, because so far you had only learned how to throw it away.  And maybe recovery has been a gift in your life, the best possible thing that could have happened next.

Or maybe you got married on a beautiful spring day to the love of your life, and everything was peaches and cream, and you looked forward to a lifetime of bliss.  But before the kids were even out of diapers the shouting matches between the two of you were interrupted only by long, steely silences that were better maintained from separate bedrooms, and the divorce was ugly, and the fight for the kids left you estranged from them, and none of this was supposed to be the stuff that happened next, but here it had happened, and now you could hardly be more miserable, and you would fall asleep at night wondering over and over, more from fear than hope: what happens next?

Shall I go on?  Middle age, and all its challenges; getting older and worrying about money, and sickness, and health, and your grown kids whose lives have not turned out the way they were supposed to; the market collapses, and with it your retirement plans.  And you are wondering: what happens next.

And sometimes you pray about it deliberately, sometimes you know that you are relying on God alone, because you know that you don’t have the strength, or the wisdom, or the patience, or the fortitude to navigate it on your own, and you think thing only thing that can happen next is that everything will only ever go downhill…

… but it doesn’t.  Somehow light shines in the darkness, hope emerges where there was none, healing happens. mercy is given, forgiveness is found.  That’s what happens next.

And then there are the graveyards.  There are more people buried in the graveyards of our hearts right here this morning than any of us can count.  There are infant children buried here in our hearts today, and there are aged grandparents buried.  There are spouses, and lovers, and best friends, and college buddies, there are sisters and brothers, fathers, and so many mothers buried here in our hearts today.  There are painful, aching memories, not only of their deaths, but of their dying – sometimes too long and drawn out, sometimes too sudden and alarming.  And alongside every one of those deaths there is the haunting question that sometimes seems just as present as it was the day she died – what happens next?  Can I survive without him?  Will the sun ever shine, and if it does, will I ever want to look at its beams again?  Will this sorrow ever get any easier to bear?  Will the loneliness ever subside?  What happens next?

At times like this, everything in life seems like an idle tale – either an outright lie (Please, don’t try to make me feel better by telling me the sun will come out tomorrow when I know it won’t!), or like that awful question will just be hanging in the air for ever – what happens next?

Hey guys, Jesus is risen, the tomb is empty, isn’t that great!

Well, we’ll see; what happens next?

What happens next is this: that Jesus, having toured the depths of hell during his three-days excursion in death, now begins traveling to all the secret hells that we have set up in our own lives, like little dioramas of misery, some of which we show to anyone who wants to look, and some of which we keep hidden in the darkest corners of our souls.  The caption, the script, the banner, the title, the message of all those little hellish scenes is this: What happens next?  And it asked with a defiance that suggest the asker knows what happens next: nothing, for faith and hope and love are nothing but an idle tale – told, most often, by an idiot of some degree or another.

I have constructed such hellish dioramas in my own heart.  In fact, I am building one right now in my spare time – mostly from the borrowed material of someone I love, and whose life, I fear, is in grave danger quite beyond his control.  And nearly every day I wonder, so what happens next?  And the question frankly fills me with dread.

But I remember how those first followers of Jesus believed the news of his resurrection – the news that life would and can and does, indeed, triumph over death – how that news seemed, even to those who knew him well, an idle tale.

And I already know that it is not.  For I have seen his glory rising time after time in a thousand little Easters that smash our dioramas of hell into little bits and pieces.  I have seen it in my own life and in the lives of countless others I have known and heard about.  I have felt the warmth of the rising Sun, when I was sure it would never rise again.  I have looked into tombs I thought should be over-crowded and found them empty.

And if you never have, then today is the day to look and see that you have been given the strength, or the wisdom, or the patience, or the fortitude to navigate the dark and awful questions that leave you asking in dire hope: what happens next?

What happens next is that Jesus rises again and again from the graves of our lives, bringing hope and new life where there was only ever death and despair.  And that is a story worth telling with shouts of Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, for the Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A few weeks ago a dear friend who lives in the country called with sad news: a horse had died.  It was one of two horses he’d bought for his kids, really, when they were teenagers and riding was one of their sports.  Since they lived in the country it was no big deal to buy the horses and keep them on the farm.  But after the kids grew up and outgrew riding and went off to college, my friend, their father, who had himself ridden as a teenager, decided that he would take up riding again – it would be good for him and for the horse.  He chose Moe, the big gelding thoroughbred he’d bought for his son.

So he would ride in the mornings around his property, and along the shady trails that lead through neighboring farms and along the river, and he would ride in the open field where he still had jumps set up from the days when his kids learned to ride the horses over them.  And he would practice his jumping, and enjoy the air and feeling of remarkable freedom you get when a horse is carrying you faster than you think ought to be possible, and then flying with easy grace over a log, or a ditch, or an obstacle set up in the field.  And he was right: it was good for him and for the horse.

Since I started to ride a few years ago, I would visit my friend and I’d ride the other horse.  We would ride together through the woods, and down to the river, and along the road, with my dogs alongside us, except when we cantered and the dogs couldn’t keep up, and then we’d stop and wait for them at a turn in the path or at the top of a hill.  Horses live for a good thirty years or so, and my friend’s horses were getting on in years, but we didn’t work them very hard.

Lately my friend was riding a bit more frequently, having reached a point in his life when he could take it a little easier at work.  And although we live at some distance, and so don’t ride together often, we talk regularly to share stories of our riding accomplishments or failures.  And the other day he called.  A few days before, he reported, Moe had stopped eating, which was a worry.  And on the day he called he’d walked out to the barn to check on him, but Moe didn’t look like his old self.  My friend put a lead rope on him to walk him down the long drive that leads to the entrance of the farm – maybe he needed to get out of his stall, out of the barn?

At the end of the drive, he tied Moe up to the fence for a moment to get the mail out of the box.  And when he turned around, Moe was quivering.  The quivering quickly turned into convulsions which sent the chestnut thoroughbred down to the ground, into the ditch that runs beside the drive; the horse was now clearly unable to get up.

My friend went around to the horse’s head, and there he laid down in the ditch next to Moe, and he held his head, and he told him it was OK, he told he would be alright, he told him what a wonderful horse he had been for him and for his kids.  And finally Moe quieted down, and his great sides heaved their last breaths, and his nostrils fluttered as they left him, and he died there with his head in the arms of a man who had owned and ridden that horse for 24 years.

My friend called the vet, and on doing so immediately began to feel guilty: what had he done?!  Had he ridden his horse to death, he wondered?  Should he have just put him out to pasture and not taken him out for those canters through the woods, not jumped over that fallen tree beside the pasture that makes such a perfect jump?  Should he have refused to take me out for rides when I came to visit, because, after all, the horses were getting older?

And the vet looked at my friend and asked him this: Did Moe ever refuse to trot when you asked him?  Did he ever refuse to canter or to gallop?  Did he ever once refuse to jump over that fallen tree, or anything else that you asked him to jump over?

Not once, my friend replied, not once did he refuse.  And my friend had the answer to his worry that he had asked of his horse something that the horse was not willing or able to give.

...

On Good Friday, it seems a trivial thing to compare the death of Jesus to the death of a horse.  The Psalmist reminds us that God “hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse,” but I am not convinced the Psalmist is correct here.

In any case, there is nothing trivial in remembering that spiritually speaking, Jesus carries us through life.  If you have ever fallen to your knees to beg for something in prayer, you know what it feels like to realize that you are counting on Jesus to carry you on his back.  If you have ever found that you are at the limit of your own ability, or patience, or strength, or whatever, and turned to Jesus in desperation, then you know something about how this feels. 

You think we ask horses to do things that we could somehow do ourselves?  Horses have done for mankind things that we are not capable of doing without them.  Many of us don’t turn to Jesus until we realize that we need something done that we are not capable of doing ourselves, and then we ask him to do it.  The Christian faith has thrived because of that remarkable freedom we discover when Jesus carries us with easy grace over obstacles that we know we could never clear on our own, when he propels us forward with a speed and a strength that is quite definitely not our own.

But of course these days Jesus has become nearly as passé as horses have: as much of an anachronism in people’s lives as riding a horse through the streets of Philadelphia.  Which is why it is not, perhaps, so trivial a comparison.  Because in modern, sensible, adult society everybody knows that you don’t grieve for an animal for all that long when it dies, you don’t weep and moan about it, you certainly don’t let it change your life.  You get over it quickly, because it was, after all, only a horse. 

And what’s the difference, in modern, sensible, adult society, between a horse and Jesus?  You think most people expect you to take this Jesus stuff seriously?  You think you are supposed to weep and moan on Good Friday?  You think you are supposed to be any more undone than you would be by the death of an animal, a pet?  You think you are supposed to let the death of Jesus change your life?  In the world we live in, such sensitivities are the domain only of old ladies, and effeminate boys, and a certain kind of pathetic liberal who can’t seem to find a better framework for making sense of the world.

But here we are, dropping to our knees, almost as if we are ready to get down into the ditch and cradle the horse’s head in our arms – or cradle Jesus’ head in our arms, when he has been taken down from the Cross.  It’s almost as if we are trying to remember that remarkable freedom of being carried, supported, lifted high over the obstacle we cannot cross ourselves – even the great abyss of death, at whose gate we are now paused, Christ’s body in our arms, having heaved his last breaths, as they flutter through his nostrils.

…

The second call my friend made, after the vet, was to his neighbor with a backhoe, who came and dug a grave for Moe, right there at the end of the drive, just beside the crepe myrtles that my friend had planted for his daughter’s wedding.  And here, I pray, the comparison does become trivial.  Grass will grow, as it must, over the grave of my friend’s horse.

But as we see in our mind’s eye, Jesus’ body wrapped in its shroud, and lowered into its grave, we might ask ourselves, what have we done?  The question is implied in our liturgy today: what have we done to you, O Lord?

And a voice answers us: did I ever fail to carry you when you needed me to?  Did I ever fail to gallop for you?  Did I ever refuse to sail over an obstacle with speed and grace that you yourself lacked, carrying you on my back?

No, my child, I never did.  And fear not, for neither will I refuse to carry you over the abyss, and past the grave and gate of death.  For I have never refused you before, and I never will.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday 2013

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia