Saint Mark's Church

When I was in seminary, one of the requirements was a course in systematic theology, and we had to read hundreds of pages from the work of Karl Barth, a famous 20^th century theologian, whose massive theological work, Church Dogmatics, runs to like 20 volumes. It is an incredibly convoluted and dense work. I thought of bringing a selection to read to you, but I’m hoping that you will actually listen to me for a little bit of time and I’m rather sure that thirty seconds of Barth would discourage that. After our class had spent weeks wrestling with Barth’s difficult style and Teutonic prose, the professor told us a story about Barth. At one point, a cheeky reporter had asked him to sum up his million word theological tome in a sentence or two. Barth thought about it for a moment and quoted a children’s song to the reporter: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

There was, the professor was telling all us serious and earnest seminarians, a simplicity to the Christian faith. We could get wrapped in the minutiae of Barth’s neo-orthodox theology, or spend inordinate amounts of time reading about the interrelation between the different persons of the Trinity, but even Barth himself was not foolish enough to think that his writing was anything but an attempt to flesh out the heart of the Christian message, a message of stunning simplicity which a child could understand.

Which is aptly illustrated in the Gospel this morning. Sometimes Jesus teaches in complex parables, but sometimes he says exactly and precisely what he means. The disciples often don’t get it, but Jesus is speaking simply about what is going to happen: he is going to suffer, die and rise again. I find it particularly challenging to preach about the obvious passages: where is the nuance, where the need for scholarly study or clever explanation, when Jesus describing what simply is, like Barth summing his work in the lines of the children’s song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

He tells his disciples that he must be betrayed, killed and rise again, and they are afraid to ask him what he means. They’ve heard this message before, and when Peter tried to argue with him, Jesus slammed the door on Peter pretty hard. The disciples don’t understand that Jesus is saying simply what he means.

They apparently don’t understand the simple words that he has been teaching them again and again: “Whoever wants to be first must be last and a servant of all.” The disciples don’t understand that the hierarchy of God’s kingdom is a race to the bottom, a race into nothingness, to emptying the selfishness out of yourself as fast as you possibly can, until there is room for God in the space that you’ve fought to clear in your heart. The disciples are looking for power, position, maybe even riches, but not only is that not the way that Jesus operates, but he has plainly told them again and again, in simple language, that the end of his journey, the end of their journey if they follow him is death, death of self, even physical death.

To make the message clear, Jesus draws a child from the crowd. The child doesn’t know anything about theology or whatever the current debates are. The child only knows about the joy of curiousity and discovery; about the brute feelings of love, fear and hunger.

The child becomes the symbol, the illustration to the disciples of their distance from what Jesus is teaching: arguing about position or role, they cannot see the forest for the trees, the wonder in the world around them, or the glory of an innocent, simple child. The child becomes the touchstone of their distance from welcoming God into their lives.

I’d bet that a child would become a touchstone for us as well. Let’s turn the situation around, let’s pluck a child up from our culture and time to use as a measure of our welcome of Jesus. What are the odds, do you suppose, that if we plucked a child from somewhere around Philadelphia, that child would be hungry, or lonely, or living in squalor, or barely literate? What are the odds that the child would have experienced violence or abuse? What are the odds that the child would have health insurance or adequate access to health care? What are the odds the child would survive to adulthood?

To which you might say, “But the living standards of this hypothetical child have nothing to do with welcoming them.” But we have heard the simple message of the Gospel on that too recently: to care only for the spiritual needs of a person is to fail them utterly.

No, my friends, this is the simple truth that Jesus is teaching us this morning: the measure of our welcome of the least of these is the measure of our welcome of God into our lives. Because Jesus comes to lose his life, to pour himself out as a sacrifice, to squeeze the Divine Word down into the form of a child, and if we cannot make room for a child in our lives, we cannot makes the space for God.

Like all the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, God’s compassion is for the little things, the small, that which is ignored or passed over. The orphan, the alien, the widow, the child; unless we welcome and care for them we welcome not God.

Like the disciples, I think we are being reminded of how far from the kingdom we might be. Like the disciples, we are far from grasping the simplicity that Jesus is teaching: position matters naught, shameful death matters naught; whoever wants to be first must be last and become a servant to all.

The truth that Jesus is teaching is remarkably simple. It is like the child’s song. The practice of that truth, there is where the hardness and complexity comes from. But we have here again given to us in the Gospel this morning, the gift that Jesus so often gives us of symbols which we can use to begrudgingly begin again the never-ending process of prying open our hearts: welcome the child as you would welcome God. A simple message, the practicalities of which are a lifetime’s work.

Friends, we are surrounded by children in need, children in squalor, children in dire straights. There are more then enough children in need of welcome to pry open all our hearts to God’s love and grace.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

20 September 2009

Sometimes in life we find ourselves in places uncomfortable, places that don't feel like “home.” Living in Arizona was that for me. Here I was, a nice WASP-y boy who grew up in the Midwest, suddenly living in the Southwest – it was a rough transition. I had never imagined that there would be such economic disparity – that immigration could be such a divisive issue – that, and this was one of my favorite moments – you might need to make public service announcements to warn people not to shoot their guns in the air on New Years' Eve.

When I needed to flee the heat, or the culture shocks, or forget that I was a sojourner in a strange land, I would drive twenty minutes north, out from the chaos and bustle of one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, out from the triple degree heat, out from the suburban sprawl and the Scottsdale McMansions, out into the unadulterated desert, full of scrub and Saguaro cacti. I loved the silence and peace, but I also loved the drive because twenty minutes into it, the cacti suddenly were gone. It was like an invisible line drawn across the desert, a curtain beyond which those emblems of desert life could not go.

What happened was that driving north I had gently climbed up to the rim of the Valley of the Sun and the invisible line was the frost line, the thermocline, the temperature inversion line beyond which Arizona was not desert and cactus, but scrub and pinõn pines. Phoenix is in a large round valley, and all the heat and pollution collect in the valley, backing the hard earth, but when you come to the crest, you are no longer in the blast furnace of the desert, which means that the frosts come, and the cacti that are almost entirely water cannot survive freezing and thawing.

When I was in college I came across another thermocline when I was being certified as a scuba diver. The college thought that it would be a good idea to have us do the required ocean dives on May 1^st, in the waters of the North Shore of Boston. I lived in Minnesota for many years and I can’t remember being as cold as I was that morning. The waters off Massachusetts are always cold, but because of variables which I don’t understand, the depth of the dives required us to spend most of our time under the thermocline, and even though the surface temperature of the water was a balmy forty-five degrees, forty or fifty feet down it was a uniform, mind-numbing thirty five degrees, all the way to the bottom of the ocean. There was a line in the water, a visible opaque shimmer of water, where in a sudden foot or two all the warmth drained away and it became unbelievably cold. [It was so cold that, when we came to one of the required skill sections where you have to remove your mask, replace it and clear it of water, when I took my mask off I got an instant ice cream headache from the sea water cooling whatever blood was still flowing to my head.

It is always disorienting to cross a thermocline. Suddenly to change thirty degrees, to change climate, to see all signs of the desert disappear, or suddenly to have the ocean stealing the warmth from your body until you shiver and shake. It is the sudden line of demarcation between comfort and discomfort, between intelligible and confused. Which is how I feel when I read Isaiah and the Gospel this morning. Isaiah has been in rare form these last few weeks, railing at the people Israel and skewering them for their idolatry, their lack of faith, and their failure to care for the widow and orphans. He has been equally unkind to the nations around Israel, excoriating them for their idolatry, their bloodthirstiness, their assaults upon God's chosen people. The picture he has been painting is a world in which everyone’s motives are dark, in which justice is dead and gone, and in which everyone takes whatever they can get, and keeps it by their own strength. It is the kind of world that I resonate with, that feels strangely similar to me, despite the thousands of miles and years separating our culture from Isaiah’s. We too fail to care for the widow and orphan, and prize the taking and holding by brute force or raw political strength. We too are cynical, jaded, with so few prophetic voices to rouse us to action and repentance. Isaiah has been playing the slightly cracked desert prophet, and suddenly he breaks into this hymn, this ode to God’s sudden, unexpected salvation: “Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.’ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.”

Which seems to me like coming to the crest of the valley, and looking out into a brave new world. Yes, our world is a dark, and often hopeless place, but, Isaiah is saying, something is coming, a moment of God’s total and complete in-breaking and action, which completely overthrows the current order and situation, and make of the desert a garden place. It is news of unforeseen hope, of justice for the dispossessed; God’s terrible coming will restore that which is wrong, and make the place we live now, the desert place of want into a garden of unexpected richness and greenness. When that salvation comes we will recognize God’s action because the lame will walk and the blind see.

Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus, the lame walk, the blind see, and the all are given a glimpse of the compassion of our God.

Which is where I’m tempted to end, to wrap up my sermon into a neat package with Jesus’ healing the deaf man, fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah, and inaugurating the reign of God’s justice: the Isaiah’s vision of God’s redemption, in the midst of his harangue against Israel, the thermocline, the radical demarcation glimpsed in prophecy but finally realized in Jesus. But as so often happens with the Scriptures, we have a nagging problem that prevents the neat homiletic windup: the story of the Syrophoenician woman. What are we to make of this little story? This, surely, is the Jesus who said, “Blessed are those who are not offended at me,” because he seems to be remarkably offensive in this story. He initially rejects the Gentile woman who comes to him begging for her child because his mission is first to Israel, and ultimately it is her witty riposte to his open insult that causes him to give in to her request. What is going on here? Is this the fully human part of Christ, fully inculturated, struggling to come to terms with the femaleness and Gentileness of this supplicant?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we can argue that, because we have many stories of Jesus interacting with lepers, Gentiles and women in the Scriptures. More importantly, I’m not sure that we want to go too far down the road of separating the human and the divine in Jesus: that way lies complexity and heresy.

So many of the stories in the Scriptures, especially the stories in the Gospels are preserved in their complexity as teaching moments, as riddles which need to be wrestled with before they will yield up their blessing. They are like Zen koans or the teachings of the Desert fathers and mothers, which one has to live with for years, or lifetimes. They cannot be mined instantly, or cracked with post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstruction of language. They are hard sayings that resist both our culture and our impatience.

I keep coming back to Isaiah and his vision of God’s redemption, the complete and utter change in climate and season that he prophesies to Israel.

The Syrophoenician woman, the Gentiles and women that Jesus speaks to and welcomes are proof of the absolute overabundance of the vision of God’s redemption that Isaiah sees. Jesus comes not to herald the replacement of the Jewish people as the chosen people, but symbolic of how extensive the redemption of God is: even the dogs gather the crumbs under the table, even the foreigners and women participate in God’s salvation, God’s redemption. Israel is the epicenter of explosive abounding grace, which overflows out even into the tribes around God’s chosen people.

Which is indeed a drastic climate change, a distant and unseen future beyond the vision or imagination even of Isaiah, who prophesied to the nations their destruction. The redemption of God even to the Gentiles is indeed racy stuff, like the desert become garden and the wilderness flowing with streams. And so we may say “even the dogs” and mean it, for the redemption of God, his fulfillment of his promises to Israel, his lawgiving and covenant is our now ours by dint of grace and God’s abundance. Even we who are Gentiles, foreigners, women and outcasts are fed by God’s grace and see, as if in the distance the thermocline God’s grace. For the desert of this current place, the desert of poverty, destitution, Machiavellian politics, brute force, economic disparity, that desert is not forever. Our God will come with terrible recompense, to save, to heal, to redeem. In that glorious moment, so extensive will God's salvation and redemption be that even the dogs will gather the crumbs of grace, the deserts explode with water, and all will know the salvation of our God.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

6 September 2009

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Last week was the anniversary of the first time that I stumbled my way through the liturgy here at St. Mark's. I’ve been thinking recently about my own experience of St. Mark’s, and of the process that led to my becoming the curate. I had not planned to become a parish priest when I was finishing seminary. I was planning on staying at seminary, enjoy living in New York City on a pittance, and working occasionally on an advanced degree, (the seminary equivalent of a surf bum) and then an e-mail arrived from Fr. Mullen asking if I would come and visit St. Mark’s. I knew nothing about this community, except that it was a famous and historic Anglo-Catholic parish. If you have any experience with Anglo-Catholic parishes, you know that they can be rather a mixed bag. Anglo-Catholic parishes have had a difficult time making the transition to this culture and this world, and so I was unjustly skeptical in my e-mail to Fr. Mullen, expressing that I love proper, high worship, but not for its own sake, and I not only like, but advocate for the inclusion of women and gay people in the Church.

Not only was Fr. Mullen’s response to my rather reactionary e-mail positive and interesting, but I e-mailed an old Anglo-Catholic priest I know in Wisconsin, of the radical variety, who responded that he hadn’t been to St. Mark’s in years, but he’d visited here during civil rights and the experience had been for him a formative one.

This was the story he told me:

My friend had gone to the rail to receive communion, and in front of him had been a very properly dressed white woman, and in front of her had been a very properly dressed African-American woman. The priest came down the rail, giving out wafers, and as he handed the consecrated bread to the three of them, the African-American woman, the white woman and the wet-behind-the-ears priest, the white woman said to priest, “I won’t drink for the chalice after that [blank],” and she used a word I won’t say, but was a very derogatory word for an African-American person. The priest had just given my friend the wafer, and returned immediately to the white woman, snatched the bread out of her hands and said to her, “You won’t take communion at all. You won’t take communion until you repent and come to confession. Leave immediately.” My friend left the rail, proud and shocked by the radical priest at this Anglo-Catholic parish that he had visited.

If you have been at all aware of the Episcopal Church in the last few decades, or even if you have ever caught the odd news story about the divisiveness in the Church today, you know that there is a massive and complex debate going on. It is billed as a debate about tradition, about Scripture, about social justice. There are all the racy elements that news organizations love: political struggle, lots and lots of money, discussions about sex, and a large quantity of rhetoric and lawsuits flying around. The debate has to do with women and gay people and their role in the Church.

So much of the rhetoric bills this as THE LAST BATTLE (with capital letters), a dispute for the mind and soul of the Church, and depending on which extreme you are listening to at the time, either the fight is about “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” or about the prejudices which haunt the Church against women and gay people.

And most Anglo-Catholic parishes have moved from being places of radical social witness, to museums prizing a golden past that never existed. Which I hope explains my dubiousness when Fr. Mullen e-mailed me.

That debate in the Church today is exacerbated by a vast rhetorical schism, which says essentially that either you are traditional in faith and worship, sexist and homophobic, or modern in faith and worship, and enlightened, and never the twain should meet, which means that St. Mark's has never been and still maybe isn't in the most comfortable place as churches go, clinging to catholic faith and liturgy, but also welcoming the poor and the oppressed.

And there are such rosy spectacles involved. Depending on who you talk to, thirty years ago was the end of the Church as we know it, before which there was peace, or thirty years ago was the period when the Church began the march into the modern era.

Any historian could tell you, of course, that in each debate or discussion that the Church has undergone since the first disciples, it always seemed to be “the last battle,” and has always been cast in brutally divergent rhetoric, and yet still the Church survives. This is no new phenomenon, but the perpetual discussion about what constitutes “true religion” and right worship.

“Increase in us true religion,” is the phrase from the collect this morning. The implication being that there is a false religion, which has nothing to do with the truth of God, and in the Gospel this morning we are given an indication as to what that “false religion” is: those rough disciples are not living up to the ritual purity laws of the Jewish faith – that complex of laws, set down in the Hebrew Scriptures, the sign and symbol of God's covenant with his people, the “sacrament,” if you like of God's love, inscribed into the daily lives of his people.

The Pharisees and scribes are quick to point this out to Jesus. “How,” they are saying, “can you claim to be Jewish, to be worshiping correctly, if you aren’t keeping the law?”

Jesus answers by quoting that magnificent, tortured prophet from the Hebrew Scriptures, Isaiah: “The people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

Isaiah is speaking about God's chosen people, and their inability to have “real” faith. Despite the externals which look religious, despite being “proper" in that religious sense, their hearts are far from true religion and it is for that reason that their worship, the honor rightly and properly due God is “in vain.”

As for the people that Isaiah was preaching to, as for the Pharisees and scribes whom Jesus was debating, so to for us: it is not enough simply to believe, say and do what is right. Right belief and action are important, but what is essential is to have hearts close to God’s heart. “In vain do they worship,” those who only espouse what is correct theologically, or liturgically or socially, if their hearts are far from God’s heart of compassion and love.

Which is where the debates in the Church today, that rhetorical divide where you must be either /or, on the right and the left fall so far short. One side is about proper doctrine and worship and one side about proper action, but in themselves they are only those “human precepts” which make our worship vain. Both sides eschew what Jesus is speaking of in the Gospels today.

As I was thinking and praying about this disparity in the Church this week, someone sent me a copy of an address given to the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress in England. In our own day, of course, such a conference would have perhaps six septuagenarian priests, and would garner as much interest as a root-canal, but in those days it was a large, well reported conference, which garnered a large number of Anglo-Catholic churchmen, as they used to be: catholic and radical.

The debates of that day were not women or human sexuality, but the reservation of the Sacrament, and the addition or use of Tabernacles in churches. Which seems alien to us here at St. Mark’s where we have long had the Sacrament reserved in our lovely Tabernacle, but there were vast quantities of energy and rhetoric expended on the issue at the time. The address, given by the then bishop of Zanzibar, a large number of whose people lived in abject poverty, is what I want to quote from:

But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, that if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums.

Now mark that -- this is the Gospel truth. If you are prepared to say that the Anglo-Catholic is at perfect liberty to rake in all the money he can get no matter what the wages are that are paid, no matter what the conditions are under which people work; if you say that the Anglo-Catholic has a right to hold his peace while his fellow citizens are living in hovels below the levels of the streets, this I say to you, that you do not yet know the Lord Jesus in his Sacrament.

I am not talking economics, I do not understand them. I am not talking politics, I do not understand them. I am talking the Gospel, and I say to you this: If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly -- it is madness -- to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.

The issues are different for us, but it is essentially the same question: can we worship Jesus without coming face to face with the issues of our world? The answer is a resounding “No.” It is not enough to have right practice, right theology, right worship. We must recognize Jesus in the poor and dispossessed around us. It is not enough to have glorious liturgies and music, to adore Jesus present in bread and wine, if we do not also recognize him in the needy. Nor is it enough simply to have radical outreach to the discriminated, if we do not also long for Christ to be a real presence in peoples’ lives. We must have both.

Just as we cannot receive communion in the state that that poor woman was here during Civil Rights, just as we cannot adore Jesus and ignore his people in the slums, we cannot preach Jesus present on the altar, and ignore the women called to stand there. We cannot preach the radical love of God, the radical love of God for his people Israel, and fail to recognize it in the love and commitment of two people of any sex. We cannot preach God’s justice and ignore the people who are suffering under the yoke of economic disparity, of racial or class prejudice. We cannot preach the peace of God while ignoring the bullets flying in our streets. “It cannot be done!”

We preach the Christ, crucified, risen and present to his people, who commands us to feed the hungry, to cloth the naked, to welcome the outcast and stranger, to pursue injustice wherever it is found.

The divide in our day is about women and gay people. Tomorrow will have a different debate, just as yesterday did, a different discussion, but for today we must echo Isaiah. We cannot preach, as so many on the one side of the debate are saying: right worship, right belief alone, and to hell with the rest of it. Neither can we say that social justice alone is the great good: full inclusion of all God’s people is important, critically important, but not in itself.  Full inclusion is critical because God comes down to be with us in the physical and that physical says to us that it is vitally important how people live. Not just in the next life, but also in this one.

We must have both: right belief and right action, emerging from a heart that is like unto God's heart: brimming with love, longing and compassion.

“Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; and bring forth the fruit of good works.”

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

30 August 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

 “To whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

 This past week the Powerball jackpot reached $250 million. (I'll bet you didn’t think I’d start my sermon that way.) There were a number of discussions, in the parish office, about what we would do if one of us won. Promises were made about paltry million dollar gifts to the rest of the staff, and presents to the parish, if one of us were to suddenly be hundreds of millions of dollars richer. A certain director of outreach forbade a priest on staff, I don’t want to say who, from buying a lottery ticket in his clerical collar. Said director of outreach ended up buying a ticket for said priest, to preserve the social standing of the clergy of St. Mark's.

The drawing came on Wednesday, and I am sorry to relate to you that St. Mark’s is not immeasurably richer this week.

The past week the New York Times also ran an interesting story. I like to keep an eye on stories of religious significance and this one was concerning a conference that happened recently in Fort Worth, Texas. The article was about a prosperity gospel conference, headed by Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. You might recognize them from TV: perfectly white teeth, in mouths that are perpetually smiling, with hair perfectly coiffed and immovable. They had a huge conference last week, preaching to thousands the news that if you have sufficient faith in God, if you give sacrificially, and can “claim that blessing,” (whatever that means) God will bless you financially. And to demonstrate the truth of what they were preaching, they told story after story about how God had blessed them with money, and possessions, often sent in by people who listen to their message. There was miraculous story after story about how people have given them money, stocks, plane tickets, even motorcycles, to demonstrate their faith in God and their anxiousness for a blessing. It seemed to me just a little too similar to another story which has been in the news lately: Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people of billions of dollars. Was this prosperity gospel much different, I wondered? Isn't a Ponzi scheme just a Ponzi scheme, whether it has religious overtones or not? And while I might go down, say on last Wednesday last to purchase a Powerball ticket when the prize hits $250 million, I don't expect that, when the numbers come up I will be that any better off because of my faith, or that God will bless me specially, because of the degree of trust that I have in him.

I understand the attraction of such a message, of course. In this time, when our economy is on such rickety footing and millions are facing unemployment, when we are spending money faster even then we can print it, when health insurance is an increasing and pervasive problem, who indeed doesn’t want certainty: returns on investment, guaranteed by smart investment bankers, or even better by God?

Just as with Bernie Madoff, so with the Copelands: if it seems too good to be true it probably is. God is not simply an ATM machine, who feeds out money if you deposit faith and sacrificial giving.

I am sometimes accused of being melancholic in my preaching, but I often wonder if the reverse is not actually the case: isn't it possible that our lives might be harder, because we know God? Might we not be called into harder and more difficult situations and interactions, because of what we believe?

At the least it is an open and perennial question that we all wrestle with. And in the Gospel this morning some, at least, of those people who have been following Jesus around come to the conclusion that it isn't an open question at all. That life following Jesus as teacher and Messiah is difficult and hard, and they don't want to do it any more. Who of us hasn't asked the same question that they do: “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Which is another way of asking why the life of faith is hard, why God's doesn't simply bless us with health and wealth, why the life of faith might actually make our lives harder and not easier?

It isn’t just the cannibalism language that Jesus is using in the Gospel that we’ve heard for the past few Sundays, that those followers find so difficult: “I am the bread of life, unless you eat of this bread, you will have no life within you.” It is the whole narrative, the faith entire that he is proclaiming. If religion is a crutch, then people are far more inclined to look for the inevitably disappointing Messiah who doesn't ask for much, rather then the Jesus who makes significant demands. “Maybe,” say those fickle followers, “maybe we need to rethink this whole 'following Jesus' thing.”

Certainly, if we look to the lives of the disciples and the saints throughout the ages, it is hard ti dispute that their lives were made shorter and more unpleasant by their life of faith. Peter, who is perhaps not the sharpest knife in the disciple drawer, but occasionally rises from his confusion to speak words of resounding truth: “Where shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” But I wonder if those words seemed a little strained to him, when he was being crucified upside down?

The martyrs too, throughout the ages, when they were going to their rather gruesome deaths, being gutted, or quartered, or eaten by lions, or griddled or shot with multiple arrows, surely they wondered slightly about this open question, about whether it was fair that God demanded so much, even their very life blood.

Surely the saints, even those ones who made it to peaceful death, surely there were times when they wondered if the cost of God’s friendship was a trifle high, or if instead of the monastic life they wouldn’t rather live a dissolute life. St. Augustine would certainly fall into that camp. Or I think of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Teresa of Avila, thrown from a cart into the mud, on her way to found a monastic house. “God,” she said, as she shook her fist at the heavens, “if this is the way that you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.” I doubt that she was the first, or will be the last to ask a variation on that question.

The question that I have been circling this morning is our own very private question that I don't doubt we ask sometimes: isn't the faith too difficult, doesn't God ask too much of us, isn't the cost of discipleship just a bit too high?

The Copelands would like you to think that faith is a panacea – financial and otherwise – that to have enough faith is to have certainty. I'm sure it is just incidental that they make millions on such a message. I will not tell you that. I will tell you instead the opposite – that this question of faith is one of the great wagers that we as humans make, a gamble as much as is the lottery. I will tell you that faith is dangerous – that God will ask much of you and if, pertly, you are tempted to ask why you then should believe, I will you give you the answer from the Gospel this morning – because these are the words of eternal life. They are not the words of temporal riches, or the words of earthly happiness. Faith doesn’t explain away the hardness of life, or the intellectual quandaries that we find ourselves in, or the existential angst of life and death, suffering and joy. But these are the words of eternal life, and true words, and once we have heard the truth of them we are indeed trapped.

Which is to say that we are right to fear, even a little bit, the hardness of Jesus teachings. These words of eternal life are hard words – they are hard to understand, words about bread and wine, the water of life, Jesus’ coming death.

But they are also hard, uncomfortable words. They are not the words of ease and comfort that one might want to hear, indeed that many long to hear, and look to prosperity gospel conferences, or financiers or political platforms to provide.

They are the words of cost, the words of sacrifice, the words that we should find a little condemning now and then. For they tell us that it is not enough to be religious in that narrow sense – we must care for people who are hard to care for. They tell us that our lives must be poured out, as Jesus’ poured his life out for us. Those words of life tell us that we must give more than we are willing to, more even then we are sure that we can. That the only sure wager or return on investment is not sure or certain in any of the terms that human wisdom or prudence find compelling – not perhaps as long as the odds on the Powerball, but daunting nevertheless.

But where else can we go? These are the words of eternal life, and having found them, or been found by them, we are caught.

Lord, teach us the words of eternal life. Give us this bread always. Take away our thirst forever. Grant us so to know you that we may gamble away our lives on you – who is our unsure certainty, our hard teaching of comfort, verily even the Word of eternal life. Amen.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

23 August 2009

I hope it is not simply my jaded desires, but food seems to be very much on the mind of so many people these days. Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc., documentaries that deal with food, health and the commercial food industry are being released and discussed. Michael Pollan, who has made a name as a writer about food, has written several books about food and the food industry in America, and last week his was the cover article in The New York Times Magazine, discussing the “foodie” culture in this country. “How is it,” Pollan was asking, “that Americans are obsessed with food, with cooking techniques, with culinary vacations and schools, with television programs about cooks and cooking, with the Food Network, and yet we cook less and less at home?”

Nor is Pollan the only person who is asking questions about food and diet. As we debate and begin to get closer to the political and rhetorical discussions which will inevitable occur around the process of attempting to reform health care in this country, food and diet plays an important part. We live in the country in the world with access to far more food than we could ever need, and one can tell by our waistlines, our diabetes rates, our incidence of heart disease. Yet despite our dietary wealth, the hungry throng our streets; our consumption has ramifications elsewhere in our society and the world.

Food is also an ecological issue, and I was ever so thrilled yesterday to hear on the radio that someone has coined the term “cookprint,” (in the same vein as “carbon footprint”) as a way of measuring the ecological ramifications of our cooking and eating habits.

As a culture we are only starting to awaken to the ecological ramifications of food, as we eye our peanut butter for salmonella and our beef for mad cow disease, it is clear that the economies of scale in food production are a two-edged sword, increasing our production, but often decreasing our health.

There are those who take these issues with a deadly seriousness. Those adherents of the faith known as “organic and local,” who worship at the altars of food co-ops and spurn those dens of iniquity, fast-food chains.

And, as if food wasn’t complicated enough, it is clear that food has a deep symbolic and aesthetic hold for most of us. No one can doubt that, picking up an issue of Gourmet magazine, or Food & Wine, and reading the almost literary lauding of food, or the ways that food can be an indicator of our class or our wealth or the ways that individuals can have very strange relationships indeed with food.

When I was in high school, I went with my father to the hospital to visit a friend of mine, and the child of a member of the parish, who had been hospitalized with anorexia nervosa. She was a few years older than me, and yet she weighed ninety pounds. Her skin was yellow as she flirted with jaundice.

I realized, as I spoke with her, that her life had a hole, an emptiness at its center – she was a living walking ball of hunger and desire; I realized that the cold hunger at her core was not about food, or health, or ecology. It was about control, longing and desire.

Here was my friend, living a life of happiness, in a wealthy upper middle-class, white suburban family, with a vast gaping, bottomless hole in the center of her life.

So food, for us, is a complex thing, and we as a culture have a complex relationship with it. We adore food, and hate it sometimes; there is, most certainly, a great deal of emotion connected to food for us. I wonder, as I listen to the focus, the obsession, the mania about food, and where it comes from, and who gets it, if all that energy and focus does really mean that we as a culture, as a society, are desperately, desperately hungry and full of longing.

I wonder if the obsession about food in our culture isn't really the symptom of a rather old story, that “God-shaped hole” which St. Augustine was trying to describe in The Confessions, in that oft quoted phrase “You made us for yourself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.”

Which would make what Jesus is saying in the Gospel for this morning rather simple.

“I am the bread of life,” says Jesus, “I come to fill the hunger within you. I am what you are longing for, in whatever way you long.” It is little wonder that the crowd starts to wonder and people start to complain. We would do the same. Who is this teacher, to make claims of that order? Hunger, thirst, longing, desire; those are universal feelings that everyone experiences, that form the bedrock of our human experience. Every infant knows hunger and longing, every adult fears feeling them. And who doesn’t get a little tense, when some strange teacher suggests to us that there is emptiness at the center of us.

Indeed, so much of our culture seems to be an attempt to preserve the myth that the emptiness is not just outside our doors, waiting to spring on us.

Longing, desire, thirst are universal, and what Jesus is saying when he says “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the vine, you are the branches,” or when he speaks of “living waters” is a simple hammering home of the point that nothing, ultimately, will take away that longing and thirst, that hunger at the center of our beings, except the One who created it in our hearts.

Which leaves us in rather an unusual place. We need food, we are built to long for many things in life, but the longing that we have for those necessities, what they remind us of are the longing that we have for the Bread from Heaven, for that food which will sate us forever and ever.

Which some people have take to mean that the Christian faith is about a great deal of self-denial and self-punishment. But notice that Jesus doesn't really seem to be into a great deal of self-denial. So many of the stories about Jesus are him healing, or feeding thousands, or sitting down to a meal with his friends. So many of the images of the Scriptures are images about food and feasting, about the dinner which will ring down the curtain on this life. So many of the stories of Jesus are stories about Jesus interacting with the physical, not as religious prude, or as aesthete, but as someone who sees the good things in life, food, wine, friendship, and silence, and loves them for what they are. Not as symbols, not as something to be hated or feared, or loved overly much, but as manna in the wilderness, bread for the journey, an aperitif to wet the appetites, for that feast and supper which is the true ending of our hungers, our longings and desires: Jesus, Lamb of God, the bread of life.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

9 August 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia