Saint Mark's Church

What’s the best first sentence? You know, like “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” or “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” First sentences are important – they set the mood, set the tone, draw you in – but they’re also just kind of fun, even famous in their own right. The American Book Review has even created a list of the top 100 best first lines of all time. “Call me Ishmael” is number one, in case you’re curious. What’s your favorite? Okay, I know, you’re in church, so you’re all thinking that maybe you’d better go with  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” since God is listening and all, but let’s just assume that one for now. What about “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Or “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Or “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Or “Mrs. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”*

There are, of course, tons of first lines to choose from, but I’ll bet that not one of you would pick “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.” Now, true, this isn’t exactly the first line of Luke’s Gospel, but that line isn’t much better. “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”

Oy. That sets the tone for sure, although I’m not sure it really draws you in as much as it makes you imagine yourself in a post-lunch overly-warm lecture hall about to settle in for a long winter’s nap. But you shouldn’t give up on Luke too quickly, because even though he says (twice) that he’s planning on writing an “orderly account,” once he starts writing, he just can’t help himself – he ends up writing a musical. Everyone in his story just keeps breaking into song – Mary and Zechariah and the angel with the multitude of the heavenly host and Simeon…they’re all so full of joy and wonder that they’ve just gotta sing!

But now that Luke has gotten to chapter 3, it’s like he suddenly remembers what kind of story he’s supposed to be writing. Right! Right, an orderly account. Okay. Back to lecture. So, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, etc., etc., etc., But we must be careful here. Because Luke is not just setting the stage for the who, what, where, and when – he is also setting us up. Now most of us have heard this text so many times that we tend to gloss over the first part of it – right, a bunch of historical figures who may or may not appear later on in the story – and we’ve learned to expect the second part, – right, of course the word of God came to John, he is the John, after all, John the Baptizer, the voice in the wilderness, the one who proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Seems self-evident to me. But look again at what Luke sets up here – that in the time of emperors and governors and rulers and princes and principalities and priests and people of immense power, the word of God came not to them but to that guy – that kind of weird guy standing by a stream in the middle of the wilderness.

And the great question is – Why? Why choose that guy? Why would God choose John? Why would God choose John’s unlikely, ancient mother to give birth to him, an unlikely, awkward prophet, just so that God could put his powerful word into John’s unlikely, acerbic mouth. Why John, a nobody, instead of all of those other people who had more money, more power, more prestige, and could certainly have had more impact? We can’t say it’s because they were just inherently unsympathetic to God’s cause or unreceptive to God’s call – you just have to look at the story of the conversion of Paul to know that God is quite happy to find a way of working around that. So why John? Or for that matter, why Abraham? Why an old, old man to be the father of a great nation? Why slippery, shifty Jacob to build the foundation for the twelve tribes of Israel? Why stuttering Moses to be God’s mouthpiece before Pharaoh? Why Ruth? Why David? Why Mary? Why does God always seem to favor the most unlikely people to do his work in the world? If the first line of creation is that in the beginning God lovingly and carefully created heaven and earth, why in the world would he hand over the future of that world to such a bunch of misfits?

Well, first of all, it’s because God, the author of all, loves a good plot twist. God delights in surprises, delights in showing us redemption and grace in the most unexpected places. I imagine that it pleases God to no end to watch his people discover him by stumbling upon him, to see us jump with a start when he pops up in strange places. After all, this is the God of the burning bush, the God of Balaam’s talking donkey, the God who appeared to Elijah as a sound of silence. God loves a good surprise, not only because surprises bring us joy in a very particular way, but also because surprises help us to see how dependent we are on him, help us to find him; surprises help to draw us in. I certainly know this from my own life. How could a God who called me to ordained ministry from Saint Mark’s Church, then sent me to low-church Virginia Theological Seminary, and then called me back to Saint Mark’s be anything other than a God who revels in a good plot twist?

But even more important than God’s love of surprise is God’s love of us. God is an author who desperately wants his characters to know one another. Why choose an unlikely prophet? Because by choosing the unlikely, God shows us that to hear his word, we are going to have to really pay attention to each other, to be alert, to look and listen for his word at all times and in all places, because we never know when we just might hear it. If God only spoke to us through the most likely mouth, we might very well just stop noticing when those mouths were moving. But there can be no cheating here. We cannot assume that we’ll hear God in a particular place or from a particular person. We cannot assume that we’ll hear God speaking to us through the most powerful, the most prominent, or the most predictable. God’s choosing the unlikely reminds us to never, ever rule someone out as a potential messenger for the word of God – the man on the street corner who is shaking for his next fix but who reminds us as we pass by that we are blessed, the child who has just learned his words but who tells us that he likes being blessed at the altar because he can feel the angel wings beating around his head, the self-avowed atheist who unintentionally echoes the great commandment when he tells us that love is a force known best by our actions – even the woman who gazes back at us in the mirror. God is happy to send his word to the most unlikely among us if that means that we will have to pay better attention to one another, to learn to read one another better, to look – hard – for the Christ that lives within each one of us, and to love one another as we love ourselves.  

And this is Advent. To look for God in the most unlikely of places – in the wilderness, in a barren womb, in a manger. This is Advent. To wait and watch with eyes and hearts wide open and expectant, to look for the coming of Christ again and again and again, to stand together upon the height and to look to the east, where God will surely gather all of us misfits into one. This is Advent. To look for God’s holy surprise – his word in our mouths, his grace in our hearts, his strength in our hands, his Son in our story. So here is the best first line of this best first season. In the final year of the first term of Barack Obama, when Tom Corbett was governor of Pennsylvania and Michael Nutter mayor of Philadelphia, when Katherine Jefferts Schori was the presiding bishop and Charles Bennison finishing his tenure as Bishop of Pennsylvania, the word of God came to…who? You? Me? Your partner? Your father? The person sitting next to you in the pew? The person you’re going to stumble across when you step out of this church? May God finish writing that first sentence for you in a most wonderful and most surprising way.

*The first lines listed here are from, in order, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Star Wars by George Lucas, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, A Christmas Carol by Dickens, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

9 December 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

It is a mercy, really, that we don’t know his name. It is not always the case, as you know, that disciples who say silly things remain anonymous – just think of poor Peter, for example. But in this moment, the disciple who says the silly thing remains mercifully nameless. He and the other disciples are heading out of the temple in Jerusalem. They have spent the past several days there – listening to Jesus spar with the Sadducees; watching the rich come and go; noticing, at Jesus’ prompting, the generous giving of one poor widow woman. But now Jesus has gathered up his sheep and begun to lead them out of the temple gate. As they wind their way down the stairs of the temple mount, pushing through the hordes of Passover pilgrims, this one disciple can’t help but turn back. He looks up, way up, craning his neck to see the stones stacked seemingly into the very clouds. “Whew!” he whistles, his eyes wide. “What great stones you have!” he says, innocent as a lamb.

Now, to be honest, knowing what we know about Herod’s temple, this disciple’s awestruck appreciation isn’t actually that silly. The temple was, in fact, hugely impressive; it was designed to be hugely impressive; it was constructed to make everyone who saw it whistle in appreciation. The platform it was built upon was in and of itself an architectural marvel, with enormous foundation stones, some of which were as high as this nave and weighed over 400 tons. Herod’s temple in Jerusalem was one of the hallmarks of his reign, an outward sign of his vast wealth and his immense – and immensely dangerous – power. It is no wonder that this little disciple from a backwater in the Galilee gushed a bit over the building, even felt a sense of pride that this was his temple, the mercy seat of his God. The temple made its mark upon him; he was im-pressed, and he thought his teacher would be impressed, too.

So in the face of this disciple’s wide-eyed wonder, Jesus’ response must have felt like the bite of a big bad wolf. “Those great stones? All the better to deceive you with, my dear disciple. Do you see these great buildings? Soon, someone will huff and puff and blow even this stone house down.” This is a devastating declaration. Because the temple was much more than a source of wonder and pride for the children of Israel; it was a mark of their election, a sign of future hope. It had already been destroyed once but had risen from the ashes, a golden assurance to generations to come of the faithfulness of their God. The temple was the locus of God’s relationship to his people, the birthplace of a new kingdom, where the Messiah would come to help his people shed the shackles of their slavery to the godless wolves of Rome. If the temple were to fall, how could Israel be saved?

It’s no wonder, then, that the moment Jesus broke their journey with a stop on the Mount of Olives, the favored (and named) disciples cornered him and pressed him for more details. They must have been shocked and scared. Ever since their youth the ultimate importance of the temple had been impressed upon them; the mark of the meaning of this building pressed into their hearts.  All of their hopes on that temple were founded, a temple their Lord had just told them would most surely fall. How could God work without a temple? And when would all this happen? As they sat gazing across the Kidron Valley at the shining temple mount, they asked themselves desperately, knowing all this, what do we do now?

That temple did fall, of course, razed by Roman troops only forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. But there are still plenty of temples for us to admire. And we are, after all, so easily impressed. Ever since our youth, the importance of these grand, worldly structures have been impressed upon us, and we almost can’t help but to place our hope upon their foundations. And so we find ourselves admiring the temples of wealth, of intelligence, of beauty or health or talent. We find that we have set our hope on the structures of human love, on a foundation of friendships that are sometimes frail and passion that is always fleeting. We find ourselves standing awestruck before the vision of a nation so pure in concept, so right in construct, that we imagine it will continue to be the vehicle for peace and justice in the world until time immemorial. We even find ourselves relying on the temple of the Church itself, impressed by its longevity and its righteous call to serve as the body of Christ in the world.

But today’s Gospel invites us to square our shoulders and to ask this difficult question: what if none of these temples last? A shocking question to be sure. What happens if we lose our wealth, if our mind is ravaged of dementia? What happens if our beauty fades, our bodies weaken, our talents dim? What happens if relationships fail, if love falls away or passion dies? What happens if our nation stumbles, overcome by political divisiveness, greed, or lust for power? And what happens if the Church as we know it fades away, just another vehicle for grace wrecked by all too human hands? What do we do then?

The tricky thing about this is that God can and does work through any and all of these things. All of them are gifts of God – our wealth, our hearts and minds, the gift of our bodies and our talents, the gift of human love, the gift of passion, the gift of a country that is founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, the gift of a Church that strives to preach the Gospel to all peoples and nations, the gift of a glorious, holy temple. But Jesus reminds us that we must not be overly impressed by any of these things, because all of these things fall. None of them is sure to last; all of them can be toppled to the ground so that not even one stone is left standing upon another. And while we might like to imagine that we can predict the way that God will use these gifts to work his will, that is not for us to decide. God will be what God will be. Temples fall. So knowing that, what do we do now?

When the temple of Jerusalem fell, indeed not one stone of the temple was left standing upon another. But there are still stones there. The Western Wall is all that is left – the remnant of one of the supporting walls for Herod’s great temple mount. There one can still see massive white stones, worn by thousands of years of rain and sun and the hands of millions of people who have traveled to Jerusalem only to fall on their knees in this holiest of places. They have stood with open mouths, craning their necks upward, awestruck by the palpable sense of God’s presence in this place, by the energy that emanates from the smooth face of the rocks and the cracks that pulse with prayers. These people, some of you among them, have not chosen to stand before these stones because they are impressed by their size, their age, or their architectural beauty. They have chosen to stand before these stones because they bear witness to the fact that when the temple falls, God is still there.

When the temple falls, God still reigns. When the temple falls, God is still at work. When the temple falls, and the wounded earth whips up superstorms and tsunamis; when the temple falls, and people struggle to find food to feed their families; when the temple falls, and rockets slice the air between Israel and Gaza; when the temple falls, and our most beloved dies, or our business fails, or our lover leaves us, or our mother no longer knows our name, God is still at work. God reigns even in the rubble; God is still sovereign even in the midst – or perhaps particularly in the midst – of suffering. We need not know how. And we need not distract ourselves with worry and predictions of when the next stone will hit the ground. What we need to do is watch and pray. “Beware that no one leads you astray,” Jesus tells his disciples. Beware of those voices sounding in your ears or inside your own heads that want to tell you that because one of these temples has fallen our world must surely end. These current sufferings are just the beginning of something new, the labor pains of a new creation groaning to be born. Let God worry about how that will happen. You just watch and pray, look for ongoing work of God in the world and trust that you will find it in the most beautiful and unexpected places. When you do this, when you let temples fall and begin to hope in things not seen, then your eyes will be opened wide enough to see that each breath is pregnant with possibility, each moment is an opportunity to witness what God is bearing into the world. Each moment will become an opportunity to be permanently and wonderfully impressed with the true wonders of this world – a tiny manger, a bloody cross, an empty tomb. Knowing this, what do we do now? Watch. Watch and pray. Look up, way up, to see what a great God we have. With this God at our right hand, we will not fall.

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

I wonder how long he’d been sitting there. Had he been there all day, in the dust and the warm spring sun? I wonder if this was the spot he always sat in, his spot, the smooth stone of the city wall worn away into a comfortable curve by the leaning of his back, the smells and sounds of the city gate familiar and homey. I wonder how he found his way there. Did a friend or a neighbor lead him there at daybreak? Or did he find his way there himself in the dewy early-morning, the path made familiar by day after day of sleepy, heavy-eyed travel – walk slowly to the smell of Miriam’s freshly baking bread, turn right when you hear Hiram’s donkey braying in his stable, watch the step up near the bubbling waters at the mikvah, and finally slide yourself into your spot along the road, your place of begging business, your tiny crease in the busy world.

I wonder if, when he sat alone by the roadside, he spent time trying to remember what the world looked like. He hadn’t always been blind, you see. He had once seen the soaring starkness of skinny palm trees, the vastness of a solid blue sky, the infinite smallness of the first star on a dark, cloudless night. He had once marveled at the sights of the world and all that was in it – at the way his honorable father’s eyes had twinkled when teasing his mother, at the tiny wrinkles in the knuckles of his baby sister, of the brightness of a smile and the curve of a shoulder and the flash of sunlit hair. But all that had been years ago, and even though sometimes he was sure that his dreams had been full of color, when he woke he couldn’t quite remember green, or the rich ruby glow of wine, or the shade of his own golden-brown skin.

I wonder what they sounded like on that day. Surely he heard them coming – first the scattershot of voices carried by the wind, then the buzz and hum of a band of country pilgrims headed on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem for Passover. Did he sit up right away, arranging his face into just the right combination of kindness and need, draping his empty cloak over his lap to catch the coins tossed from generous hands? Or did he wait a moment, knowing that he would hear the difference in sound when the crowd rounded the bend in the road and could see him, taking those few extra seconds to linger in the cool curve of the stone behind him?

I wonder when he noticed the sound change, when he heard the buzz and hum grow into a roar. When did he realize that this was more than just a few families of pilgrims, that it was an enormous crowd – men and women and children, with accents from all over the land, their bodies buzzing with an excitement that made his own heart beat faster in his chest. I wonder how he knew that it was Jesus of Nazareth who was passing by. Did he hear snippets of conversation from the crowd, murmurings of dead children raised and live children embraced and bread broken and multiplied and shared? Did he catch the disciples still arguing over who was the favorite? Or did he just feel it when the Lord walked by – a stillness in the air that made his breath catch in his throat, a warmth like the sun on his upturned face?

I wonder what made him cry out. Where did that courage come from in the heart of this man who had always played by society’s rules, begged by the roadside like a good beggar should, lived in corners and darkness like a good blind man should? What did his voice sound like when he shouted down the road, his face turned to the place where that warmth had been? Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Did he even hear the crowds telling him to shut up, or was all he could hear his own desperate rasp of a cry and the pounding of his own heart? Again and again, Son of David, have mercy on me, have mercy on me, stop, stop and come back.

I wonder what it sounded like when the crowd shuffled and slowed and stopped. What did it feel like to have hundreds of people hushed and quiet, their attention focused on him as he waited, his ears straining to hear anything, his face turned, his body leaning into the place where that presence had passed by, waiting, longing. And then, a whisper coming down the lane, he is calling you, take heart, take courage, get up, you blind man, get up and go.

I wonder what it felt like to move, to feel the scratch of his woolen cloak as it slid off his knees, to hear the thump and jingle of coins as they fell to the ground, unheeded and unnecessary. What did it feel like to move out onto the road, to hurry down the path, sensing the still, expectant bodies all around, drawn along only by that presence, that warmth, that something out there. I wonder if it felt good – stretching out his legs, stretching out his arms, searching for this new thing, fearless in the face of his faith in this Jesus, standing directly in the Son, feeling this calm, warm, holy presence right before him.

I wonder what he thought when Jesus asked him what he wanted. Was it a thousand separate images of father and mother and family and bread and sky? Or was it just one word: green? I want green again. I want to see again, rabbi, and then the sound of those words – go, go on, your faith has made you well, and suddenly a flood of colors, the road and the trees and the sky in a tumble of greens and blues and dusty brown feet and bright white smiles. And the man standing before him with dark eyes as rich as wine. I wonder what it felt like to watch that man smile, turn his face towards Jerusalem and move along down the road, to feel the crowds begin to move along with him. I wonder what it felt like to choose: to look back at his place of sitting and to then turn away – to leave his cloak and his coins and his comfy cool curve of stone and to move along, to follow this man wherever he was going, whenever he might get there, however his life might be forever and forever changed.

I wonder where we find ourselves in this story. I wonder if today this Gospel is inviting us to draw near to Bartimaeus, to find ourselves at his side, to recognize something of ourselves in the man who has spent his life sitting in one place. After all, we find our way to this place by the same old sounds and smells – wake up and walk straight until you smell the incense, turn right when you hear the rustle of choir robes, slide yourself into the comfort of your pew. We lean back into the curve of this familiar worship, of our familiar prayer practices and scripture study and stewardship and service, day after day. And that sitting still, that sameness, that little crease of faith in a hectic and busy world can feel stable and steady and reassuring. But I wonder if this Gospel is inviting us into more, encouraging us, too, to take heart, get up, and move along. I wonder if this Gospel is reminding us that discipleship is not really about sitting still.       

This is not to say that we shouldn’t fully embrace the familiarity of this worship, of our prayer and study and stewardship and service. How in the world could I stand in the pulpit at Saint Mark’s Church and say that? No, these familiar practices are critical to the life of discipleship. But just because our practices are the same every day doesn’t mean that our faith should be the same every day as well. In fact, these practices of discipleship are important not because they help us to sit still, but because they help us to move – to notice Christ’s presence, to summon the courage to call out for his mercy, to hear his voice calling us to something new. And he is always calling us to something new. Why would we ever imagine that God would call us only once? Why would we ever imagine that God’s process of transformation would simply stop? God wants more for us – more of us – than that. Our discipleship is a journey; it is “the way” not “the destination.” It is a path, a process, not a place where one hangs a plaque and says, Here I will sit from now until eternity. We are called by Christ again, and again, to come close to him, to learn to see the world anew, and to move along.  

I wonder what it would feel like to move – to leap up from where we are now in our faith, in our discipleship, in our stewardship, and to move along the road. Perhaps you already feel like you’re already there, that, like Bartimaeus, you’re being transformed daily, that you’re moving along each and every moment because it just feels too good to stop. But for those times when you feel like you haven’t moved in a long time, when you feel like your faith has been sitting steady but perhaps a bit stale, remember – God is making all things new. God is present, here, on this road, loving you and longing to transform you – your call, your eyes, your faith, your whole life, this whole world. So lean in. Listen for that whisper down the lane, “Get up! Take heart! He is calling you.” I wonder what it would feel like to hear that voice this morning and to spring up and to move.                

Note: I am much indebted to Jerome Berryman and the Godly Play curriculum for the language of this sermon. The "wondering" comes from him!

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

28 October 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Phelps's sermon here.

Preached by Father Nicholas Phelps

21 October 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

My mother was good at many things. She was an enthusiastic and creative teacher. She was a beautiful public speaker. She made a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And she was a dedicated and consistent speech temper-er. If my brother or I said something that she considered to be too extreme, especially too extremely negative, she would jump in right away to temper what we’d said. “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” she’d say. And then she’d suggest something she thought was more appropriate. An example, as I was pouting after banging away at a difficult piece on the piano: “You don’t mean that you hate this piece, honey; it’s just not your favorite.” Mom liked gentle speech – we couldn’t hate something or wish we would just die or never, ever, ever do something again. She would always try to moderate our extremes, temper our bitter words with a touch of sweetness, encourage speech that was a little softer, a little nicer. “Oh, you don’t really mean that,” she’d say. And most of the time, she was exactly right.                

Maybe some of you have mothers like this. And maybe it’s because of mothers like this that I find myself wondering what Mary was thinking while Jesus was giving this charming little speech in today’s Gospel, how she was feeling when Jesus suddenly started talking about chopping off body parts. “Oh, Jeshua,” I can hear her saying, “you don’t really mean cut off your own foot; you mean watch out for where that foot might take you.” And, “Now, honey, wouldn’t it be nicer to say something like, ‘Try to look only at beautiful and holy things’ rather than telling people to gouge their eyes out?” You don’t really mean that, Jesus, I can hear her saying.

And the truth is, she’s right. He probably didn’t really mean what he was saying. Everyone who reads this passage can see that Jesus is using this extreme speech to make a dramatic point. He’s practicing the art of hyperbole, standing in a long line of Biblical figures who valued and carefully crafted the skill of purposeful exaggeration. We hear the same kind of extreme speech from Moses when he was confronted with the whining Israelite rabble: “Look, God, did I conceive all this people? Am I their babysitter now? If you seriously expect me to find meat to feed this bunch of babies, if this is how you value our relationship, then just kill me now. Take me. Out of. My. Misery.” This is the tradition of intentional exaggeration that Jesus has inherited, the kind of speech that Jesus is putting to work here. It would be better for you, he says, to be drowned in the sea than to turn another person away from me by your actions. It would be better to cut off one of your own limbs than to allow it to trip you up in your own discipleship. In other words: stay out of the way. Better to be drowned, or to go about life maimed, lame, or half-blind than to get in the way of your own faith or anyone else’s.

So yes, we’re on fairly safe ground not taking this text too literally. After all, we don’t hear about the great mass limb-chopping before the day of Pentecost, or of the band of one-eyed Christians who stumbled their way around Asia Minor because they had no depth perception. It’s safe to say that this extreme language is intended to make a point. It’s safe to say, “Okay, Jesus, we know that isn’t really what you meant, so we’re going to soften up your language just a bit.” How about, “Keep an eye out, Christians, for the things that get in the way of belief.”

But it is profoundly unsafe to let this word-tempering turn into a habit. We get ourselves into trouble when we start applying this tempering technique willy nilly, when we let our discomfort with other extreme things that Jesus said push us to try to find nicer, more appropriate, more doable, alternatives to them as well. And we do this all the time. We don’t mean to, and sometimes we aren’t even aware of it, but we do. We take “love your enemies” and say, well, maybe not “love” maybe just “be nice to” or at least “don’t be mean to.” And maybe not really your enemies but just the people who slightly annoy you. We hear “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel,” and we soften it to “Go to people who are already kind of receptive and try to casually slip the Gospel into the conversation.” We translate “do this in remembrance of me” into “do this when it is convenient for you.” We temper “take up your cross and follow me” and “feed the hungry,” and “love one another as I have loved you.” We don’t mean to, but we do. We let our own discomfort with this kind of extreme speech push us into trying to soften these words, into trying to make this speech more digestible, more politically correct, more socially acceptable.

The trouble is that Jesus spoke in extremes all of the time, and most of the time, he meant what he said. Sure, he may have spoken in hyperbole and stretched the metaphor to drive home his point from time to time, but not all the time. Love your enemies was not an exaggeration. I am the resurrection and the life was not hyperbole. Take, eat this in remembrance of me was not a suggestion. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all is not an example of extreme speech that needs to be softened. And – and this is important – our level of discomfort is not actually a good indicator of when we should start tempering this bold speech. Some of Jesus’ words might make us uncomfortable, but that in itself isn’t a good enough reason to discount them. We are asked, we are commanded to listen to them anyway.

And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re actually asked to do more than just listen to these words of extreme love, extreme forgiveness, extreme mercy and truth and grace – we are asked to live these words, and we are asked to repeat them ourselves over and over and over again. We are asked to use this kind of extreme speech in our own lives, not to temper the way we speak about God to others or to ourselves. We are commanded to proclaim the Gospel with boldness, to boast in the cross of Christ, to visibly embrace the utter foolishness of God made man. If we don’t do this, if we don’t speak with the same strong words that Jesus did, then who in the world is going to listen to us? If the Gospel that we present to the world is merely lukewarm, then it’s no wonder that people will spit it out of their mouths. And, what’s worse, if we choose to do this – to speak in half-truths that are softened so as not to offend, or tempered so as not to make anyone uncomfortable – then guess what? We are setting ourselves up as dozens of little stumbling blocks to all of those people out there who would come to know Christ but simply need a compelling invitation. And you know what that means. It would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and be thrown into the sea, it would be better for you to try to drive west on the Schuylkill Expressway at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, it would be better for you to get stuck behind a Cowboys fan at the Linc, than to put a stumbling block before any and all of these little ones.

Now here is the good news. Right now, everyone in this church has the chance to get rid of the millstone. Because your stewardship committee has asked you to bring a friend to church on the second Sunday of October. This is the perfect opportunity to practice your extreme speech. And I do mean practice. You may need to actually stand in front of the mirror and watch the words fall out of your mouth. Words like: “You know, neighbor, when I serve soup to the homeless at Saint Mark’s, I actually see Christ in the eyes of those I feed. Would you like to come with me on Saturday?” Or: “You know, Dad, I can’t do an early brunch with you on Sunday because Sundays are holy days for me. Worship at Saint Mark’s grounds me and names me and sends me – would you like to come with me this week and we could do brunch afterwards?” Or: “You know, mother-of-playdate-friend, growing my children in the knowledge of God’s love for them is hugely important to me, and my church really helps me to do that. Would you like to come to our Family Mass and Schola with my family next Sunday?” Or: “You know, work colleague, I find God when I hear the choir offer their praises and prayers. Come hear them – and God – with me.”

This extreme speech – this strong, bold, radical speech – pleases God. These are words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts that are pleasing and acceptable in God’s sight. When we feel and speak in this way, not only do we remove the stumbling blocks from our own faith and from those we meet, we actually imitate Christ. And then the speech becomes not simply our own but the word of God made living and active in our mouths. God speaks in us when we speak this way, draws close to us to guide and strengthen us in our speaking. So we have two weeks – be bold in your speech, be extreme, and smile as you say that yes, that holy speech is exactly what you really, really mean.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

30 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia