Saint Mark's Church

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

One day this past week, while I was walking on Rittenhouse Square taking care of some errands, I came up on a young man who was obviously just out enjoying the day – strolling around, looking up at the sky, even whistling a little bit. As I passed by him, he took a long look at me in my collar and got a huge grin on his face. I’ve seen this happen enough to know what was coming next, and sure enough, he drew up next to me and asked me one of the two questions that I get here in Philadelphia at least once or twice a week: “Are you a priestess?” (If you’re wondering, the other question is “What are you?”) I laughed and said that he was close – I was a priest, actually, not a priestess, which for me always conjures up images of grey robes and standing stones and someone singing Casta diva. What he said next was completely unexpected. “You have too many crucifixes in your church!” Now he didn’t know which parish I serve, and if I worked in some other church in this city I might have been able to respond to this by saying, “Well, no, actually we don’t.” But seeing as I am a priest here, I just said, “Well, that’s interesting. Why do you say that?” To which he replied, “You know, you make it all about the cross and the sacrifice and that one moment. When really that wasn’t what Jesus spent most of his time doing, you know? He went around talking to people and showing them how to be good people. It doesn’t always have to be about the bloody cross. Jesus was just a teacher, you know?”

Now as unusual as this conversation might seem in the context of running errands in Center City, this man’s argument is certainly not an unusual one. From the Jesus seminar, to agnostics, to Christians who are critical of “The Church,” people of all types and persuasions have argued for years that the Church’s focus on the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion has obscured the “truth” about who Jesus was and what Jesus was up to. Jesus was just a teacher, you know? He was a regular man, a great faith healer, a political upstart, who taught people how to love, how to live a moral life, how to choose an ethic that supports the poor and welcomes the outcast. You don’t need all of that hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, they argue. You don’t need sacraments and sacrifice, you don’t need mystery and miracle, and you certainly don’t need crucifixes to show you how to be a follower of this man Jesus. You just need to be a good student of his words. He was just a teacher, you know?

Now Jesus certainly was a teacher. He spent a huge amount of his time teaching, and he took his teaching technique seriously. He taught in parables, he harnessed the power of rhetoric. He liked a good old-fashioned lecture but was also a big fan of experiential learning. Jesus was a teacher, and an excellent one at that. Let’s look at today’s Gospel as an example. Now any good teacher will tell you that before entering the classroom, you need to have prepared a very detailed, very comprehensive lesson plan, with goals, objectives, procedures, and a means of evaluation. As one educational website says, you have to know where the students are going, how they will get there, and how you will know that they’ve made it. So here’s Jesus, heading to the villages of Caesarea Philippi with disciples in tow. It’s a bright, sunny day, with a high blue sky. Everyone is in a good mood. Peter and James and John are out in front of the group, still talking about the healing of the blind man they’d just seen in Bethsaida. Andrew and Phillip are practically skipping along, thrilled to be on the other side of the sea from the Pharisees. Judas is walking alone, wondering aloud where he might get some more of that magically multiplying bread. It is as good a time as any, so Jesus pulls out his lesson plan and calls his class to order. After dealing with Bartholomew who whines oh, Son of Man, can’t we just stroll along and look at the sky for a little while?, Jesus begins to teach.

Today’s Lesson: Jesus the Messiah. Goals for the lesson: 1. to clarify the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ identity; 2. to increase the disciples’ understanding of Jesus’ mission; and 3. to introduce the disciples to a deeper understanding of their own mission. Objective 1: The disciples will be able to identify Jesus as Messiah. 2. The disciples will be able to define the word “Messiah.” 3. The disciples will be able to describe what the role of the Messiah looks like in the world, highlighting the Messiah’s suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection. 4. The disciples will be able to describe their own response to this Messiah, including taking up their own cross, following him faithfully, and turning over their entire lives to their discipleship.  

Procedure. Step 1: Ask the disciples who people say that Jesus is. Step 2: After hearing these responses, then ask the disciples who they think Jesus is. Step 3: Once the disciples have correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, strongly redefine this word for them by outlining how the Messiah will suffer, die, and rise again. [Accommodation for learning disabled students: If Peter has trouble understanding this new definition, privately rearticulate this vision in a firm and unyielding manner.] Step 4: Once the disciples are able to articulate this new definition of Messiahship, gather in all of the students and give them their work, which is to take on this cross themselves, be willing to sacrifice their own selfish desires when they come into conflict with the will of God, and let go of their death grip on their own lives. Step 5: Continue along the journey, with the disciples beginning to work on the integration of this learning. Evaluation: Jesus the teacher will closely observe the disciples’ progress over the coming days and weeks by noting how they demonstrate love for God and one another. Final note: this lesson may be repeated as necessary, even up to three times total, in order for the learning to be fully assimilated.

This really is an excellent lesson plan. It has clear goals, clear procedures, and an understanding that the objectives will only be met when the disciples adopt this new cross-bearing, self-giving way of being. Jesus is clearly all about instruction here – Mark tells us that he began to “teach” the disciples about the true nature of his Messiahship – not warn them, not pass along to them, but teach them. And Jesus does, in fact, present this lesson again – three times in fact – each time instructing the disciples clearly about what will happen to him for their sakes.

Jesus is a teacher, a dedicated, passionate, efficacious teacher. But he is not “just” a teacher because he teaches, any more than the Bible is “just” a history book because it contains history. Because what is it that Jesus is teaching? It is the lesson of the cross. Jesus is teaching them this – the crucifix. Jesus is a teacher, yes, but he offers us more than simply lessons about how to be kind or how to make good decisions. Jesus is a teacher, and he is a good enough teacher to save his most serious and powerful instruction for the lesson that is most important for his disciples, for us, to learn – the lesson of the cross. Here, right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel, at the heart, at the crux of Mark’s proclamation, Jesus works up his most excellent lesson to teach us the central truth of his own ministry: that the Son of Man will experience the fullness of humanity – our suffering, our rejection, even our death – and will transform it all. The cross – this place of shame and suffering – is changed into a place of mercy and glory in the hands of a loving God. The cross changes everything. The cross is the root of our education, the core learning of the Gospel, the wisdom Christ wants to impart. In fact, the cross is the lesson, and the goal, and the teacher, and the evaluation all in one.

And the class, of course, is still in session. The lesson goes on. That great “if” still lingers in the air: “If any want to become my followers….” Is that, in fact, what you want – to be a follower of this Messiah? Is that what you want – to learn this lesson, to practice it again and again until it becomes etched into your heart and soul? Do you want to be a student of this Jesus, to “listen as though who are taught” and to set your mind on divine things instead of human ones, to bear this cross?   

Jesus is before you, waiting for your answer, longing to teach you. You know the lesson; you have seen it again and again. You see the lesson hanging all over this church. The cross is our vindication, and our vindication is nigh. Jesus is Messiah. Study that, you know?

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

16 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

So unless you have been on Mars for the last week, or, perhaps, spent your entire week looking at the photographs from Mars (which are very, very cool), you know that this past week was the Republican National Convention. I didn’t watch any of it. This had nothing to do with a lack of interest in politics, or Republicans, or Tampa, and everything to do with the fact that I was away on retreat in a group house in Cape May where the only other guests were children from the Youth Chorale of Trinity Wall Street who, as you might imagine, had other ideas about what to watch on the house’s one television. So on Friday morning, when I checked my news feed on Facebook and saw that multiple friends had posted something about Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair, I was perplexed. I was also a little concerned that Clint had gone off his rocker – but most of all I was curious. So I went online, googled “Clint Eastwood empty chair” and easily found his speech.

In case you missed the excitement, Clint Eastwood did, in fact, spend a chunk of his allotted time in front of the GOP faithful talking to an empty chair. But rest assured he has not gone off his rocker. No, Clint was pretending that President Obama was sitting in the empty chair. He asked the President questions. He pretended that the President answered him. Mostly he played to the crowd, making jokes at the President’s expense with the kind of biting sarcasm and mockery that Americans of both parties have somehow decided is appropriate for our nation’s political discourse. The empty chair was actually the perfect convention speech tool – it allowed Mr. Eastwood to be in complete control of the conversation, to ask questions and hear only the answers he wanted, to set up the laughs he wanted, to stir up the applause he wanted, to get in all of the digs he wanted. Talking to an empty chair was a strangely effective stunt. It wasn’t a real conversation, and it might have made him look a little foolish, but it accomplished his purpose, and that’s really all that matters.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what a lot of the world thinks we Christians are doing a lot of the time. They think that we gather here today on this first day of the week to gather around an empty throne and talk to an empty chair. Critics like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have written volumes trying to prove that there is no God, that religion is a massive social delusion, that the chair is demonstrably empty. The young unchurched in this country smartly ask why, if there actually is Someone, capital “S,” in the chair, we religious folks who are asking the questions all end up with such wildly different and aggressively competing answers. The outcast, particularly those who have been cast out, judged, and abused by the Church, look at the chair and hope that it’s empty, because they don’t want to even imagine that the Someone in the chair might reject them because they’re gay, or because they use birth control, or because they aren’t an American citizen, or because they smell, or have AIDS, or have doubts. The world looks at us at worship or prayer and sees us talking to an empty chair, imagines us carrying on a conversation all alone, asking and answering our own questions to make ourselves feel better, or to show how holy we are, or to try to help our neighbors be more lovable by remaking them in our own image. This isn’t a real conversation, they say – it makes you look foolish, and it might accomplish your purposes, but that actually doesn’t at all matter to us.  

What’s worse is that sometimes we in the Church act like we’re talking to an empty chair ourselves. Church leaders look with woe at parishes that are dying if not dead, count and recount our shrinking national Average Sunday attendance figures and our parish and diocesan budgets, and then imagine that the chair must be empty, at least temporarily. We in the Church sometimes look at the throne of God and see nothing but an empty seat. We have a hard time imagining a conversation where God might be able to do something new, and so we start talking to ourselves – which churches to close, which positions to eliminate, which liturgies to cut or shorten or “update” and “make relevant.” We start responding to our own questions with answers based in fear and an overwhelming sense of scarcity. And it isn’t just church leaders who do this. How often do you and I worry that we’re talking to an empty chair? We pray and forget to listen, we conjure up our own answers because we tire of listening for God’s, or, worse, we look at that empty chair and don’t bother to pray at all. No wonder the world looks in on us and wonders if we’ve gone off our rocker.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. The Israelites who followed Moses into the wilderness had gone off their rocker fairly regularly in their forty years of wandering. They moaned and complained for most of the journey, mostly moaning and complaining that their God had left them alone. When Moses went up the mountain, they looked around their campsite and saw only a big empty chair, so they happily set about filling it with a golden calf. They doubted and feared and rejected God; they imagined that no one was around to listen to them, and so they got to work answering their own questions in God’s absence.

But now, now, Moses says to them, you are here. You are standing on the edge of promise, looking into the land that flows with milk and honey, the land that God has always said he would give to you and to your children. And now that you are here, you are to keep God’s commandments and teach them to your children and to your children’s children. And why is this so important? Because keeping the commandments of God helps you to remember that God is near. God has given you all of these commandments not only because they will help you to live well in this holy land, but because they will remind you of God’s closeness every minute of every day, so that every time you say thank you, or bless this, or help me, you will be mindful of God right beside you. The commandments are given not as rules to follow in God’s absence, but as triggers to remind you of God’s presence. And when you live them out, you will be so steeped in God’s presence that when others see you, they will say, “What a fabulous bunch of people! I want to be just like them!” And they will say this because when they see you, they will see that there is, in fact, Someone sitting in the chair.

What a gift to give to this broken world. What a wonderful, timely, desperately necessary gift. To offer the world, by our own following of the commandments and by our own remembering of who gave them to us, a daily reminder that God is near. Isn’t that, ultimately, what the world most needs to remember? Don’t we want to help the world, and the Church, to see that the chair is full, that God sits on his holy throne, that the hem of his garment fills the temple? Isn’t that what we are sent to bear witness to – not that we’re Christians and we have it all together, or we’re Christians and we can tell you exactly how to live your life, or we’re Christians and so watch us be extra holy, but we’re Christians and our God is near. Our God reigns. When we pray, we pray to a God who is and who ever shall be. When we ask questions, God answers – maybe not when or how we imagine, but God is a God who responds. We speak and sing and cry and shout and moan and weep to a God who is very, very close to us, so close it’s like he’s sitting in the chair right next to you, so close it’s like he is sitting in your own heart.

And so here we stand, looking out over a new land, at the new program year at Saint Mark’s, at the new school year, at a new political year. So, now, you people, give heed to the great commandments that God has provided for you. Be doers of the word, care for the widows and orphans, love one another as Christ has loved you. Keep these commandments always and teach them to your children. Keep these commandments so that you will remember who you are and whose you are. Live in this holy way, so that when the world looks at you, they will see the truth that God is very near, that God reigns, that the chair is full.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

2 September 2012

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Kenworthy's sermon here.

Preached by Father Stuart Kenworthy

5 August 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Erika's sermon here.

In the early 2000’s, researchers at Cornell University conducted an experiment about people’s eating habits. Participants were simply asked to eat a bowl of soup, and to stop eating when they felt full. Easy enough. The trick was that some of the bowls of soup were just bowls of soup, but some of the bowls were not. They were attached to a pump that continuously refilled the soup from the bottom without the eater being any the wiser. Picture the never-ending soup bowl lunch special at Olive Garden – just a lot sneakier. There was always soup in the bowl – the participants could eat and eat and eat, and the soup would never run out.  

And as you might have already guessed, the people sitting before the magical refilling soup bowls did just that – they ate, and ate, and ate. Across the board, the participants eating from the refilling bowls ate more than the other soup eaters, and they didn’t indicate that they felt stuffed or even that they noticed that they had eaten more than the bowl looked as if it would allow. They just ate and ate and ate. Who knows – they might have been content to continue eating into infinity if there had also been a magical refilling bread basket and a magical refilling glass of Chianti.

The question was…why? Why didn’t they notice how much they were eating? Why were they deceived by a ploy that, one would imagine, should have become evident about 15 or 20 spoonfuls in?     Well, apparently, contrary to what our mothers always told us, it’s actually hard for our eyes to be too big for our stomachs. If our eyes can be deceived into thinking we’re eating a “normal” sized meal, our stomachs will happily play along. We hear about this all the time in reports about the gradual growth in dinner plates and paper cups and portion sizes that has given us plates as big as manhole covers, 64 oz. gigantor gulps, and double supersized shovels-full-o’ French fries. And why are our stomachs so happy to oblige our big eyes? Well, according to some scientists, it’s because we are built for scarcity. Throughout history, generations of men and women have had to live on very, very little, and so when they were presented with a feast, their bodies basically told them, “Eat as much as you can, because you aren’t going to be seeing this much food again for a while.” And apparently, we are still programmed to do this. Even when most of us are able to eat three full meals a day, and when we live in a country with the highest obesity rate in history, we still imagine that we are built for scarcity. Our bodies live in fear that we won’t get enough food, and so we ignore our full stomachs and eat and eat and eat.

The world hears this and confidently nods its head. Yes, of course, that’s right; we are built for scarcity; we are bottomless pits of need. We have so many needs that a thoughtful man named Mazlow put them in a nice hierarchy for us so that we might know exactly what our needs are at any given time. If the world is our shepherd, it will tell us that we lack everything. There isn’t enough food to go around – not enough food for the poor in this city, for the families of famine in east Africa, or for the one hundred people around the world who have died from starvation since I began this sermon. There is drought, there is disorder and red tape and politics, and there just isn’t enough food to go around.

And it isn’t just food that we lack, the world whispers. We also lack money and love, meaning and connections. We lack safety and freedom and time. The need goes on and on. And when we start listening to that whispering, we can’t help but go a little crazy. We start slurping up anything and everything we can find while our brains tells us, “Grab this – it might help somehow someday.” We gorge ourselves on any soup we can find: food, power, information, guns, sex. We eat more calories than we can ever use in a day, we gobble up status updates and tweets like they’re real sustenance; we consume people and friendships, we guzzle gas and disposable plastics and Botox and firearms. We eat and eat and eat, all the while hearing the whispers: you are built for scarcity.

But this is a lie. For you and I are not built for scarcity, we are built for abundance. We are created, crafted and knit together, by a loving God who has made us to expect abundance. We are made first in God’s image, not just in the image of our hunt and gather ancestors. We are God’s children, and God gives us every good gift. God gives us the breath in our lungs, the voltage in our cells, the inspiration of our minds and the compassion of our hearts. This is not to say that there is not real need in the world or in our lives – but this need is an aberration, not the rule. The rule is that we are filled, all of us, with all of the fullness of God. And if we really listen to our hearts, we know that to be true. At our core, below the worry and fear, deep in our center where the truth speaks to us in the voice of the Holy Spirit, we know that God will give us our food in due season and satisfy the needs of every living creature.

Deep in our very beings, we know this, and yet we forget this again and again and again. We, like the disciples, look out at the hordes of people covered in need and we panic. Oh no, we think, there are people out there wasting away with need, people with no food, no job, no livelihood, no love, no family, no purpose, no security, no time. And we stand staring at them – or sometimes at ourselves in the mirror – and we feel paralyzed. But then, Jesus arrives. And “when he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’” He says this, John tells us, to test Philip, to see if Philip could remember in the face of the crowds what he – and they – were built for. He says this maybe with a little wink, knowing what he would do, hopeful that the disciples would know that too. But when they don’t, when instead they start talking about six months’ wages and the cheapest bread seller and where was the closest coinstar machine and did anyone have a living social discount, Jesus realizes that his guys will – again – need his help. And so when that famous second-born son, Andrew, shows Jesus the only food he’s been able to find – five barley loaves as dense and heavy as hockey pucks and two shriveled up dried fish – Jesus smiles. He tells the disciples to please show the people to their seats on the grass, gives God thanks for the food they are about to receive, and feeds the people. From a miraculous refilling bread basket. And the people eat and eat and eat, the very food of heaven, the bread of life, the abundance of grace. And then the disciples remember what they’re truly built for.

So it’s okay if we find ourselves swimming in a sense of lack, panicking because the waves of need seem to be ready to swamp our boat. It’s okay; we’re in good company. Like the disciples, we just need to be reminded that there is a way out of the storm; there is a way to silence the howling winds of the world. There is, in fact, only one way, and it’s the way the disciples learned and practiced over and over again. We look to Christ. We look out at the world and look to keep Christ at the center, Christ as the lodestone, so that no matter where our eyes may fall, no matter what the world might show us, no matter what fears and needs and lack we see, we first see Christ standing before us saying I AM. Fear not, I AM. I AM the bread of life. I AM the water of salvation. I AM the good shepherd, and therefore you shall lack nothing.

And the true miracle of this is that when we start living this way, the world changes. When we begin to live in the awareness of God’s abundance, when we claim ourselves as creatures built for that abundance, we begin to change the world in Christ’s name. In our food cupboard, we open our doors to the poor so that they can get their own bread and fishes and cereal and milk. On Saturday mornings, we offer our own miraculous bowls of refilling soup, with baskets of leftover bread that gets made into bread pudding. In our Vacation Music School, we give out the gift of music in this place to all of the children of the neighborhood. We offer a voice to the voiceless, comfort to those who mourn, connection and fellowship to the lonely. And in our worship, we invite people to come to this place to sit at table and be fed, again and again, day after day, week after week, to eat and eat and eat. And Christ standing before us, in this worship and in our ministry and mission, helps us to remember, helps us to listen to that voice deep in our guts, to his voice telling us what we are truly built for. And so sit down here and eat. And then put down your spoon and feed someone else. And together we will all eat and be most satisfied.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

29 July 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

There is hardly a more tantalizing figure in the whole of the Bible than that of Salome. The alluring young woman who dances for her stepfather the king and tricks him into giving her the head of John the Baptist on a platter has captivated the minds of painters and poets for centuries. Artists have drawn her again and again: dancing with long, flowing hair dressed in long, flowing veils; or smoldering with wily, wicked eyes; or gazing down at her gruesome prize with a strange, vacant smile. Authors and composers have written her either as a hapless innocent trapped by her scheming mother or as furious woman scorned, who lashes out at John the Baptist because he will not love her. Choreographers have fashioned their own versions of her infamous dance, usually with hearty helping of sensual looks from beneath lowered lashes and sultry poses in true Walk-Like-An-Egyptian fashion. Recently, she has even shown up as a character in the HBO series True Blood, where she is imagined as a centuries-old, supernatural creature of darkness. But whether portrayed as a victim or a viper…or a vampire…Salome has always been a siren, drawing our attention again and again, taking center stage and refusing to let us look anywhere else.

Salome is such an enticing figure that it is easy to forget that she is not the central character of this Gospel story. She really has only a supporting role; she is so unimportant, in fact, that Mark the Evangelist doesn’t even bother to get her name right, mistakenly calling her Herodias, which is actually her mother’s name. We know her real name, Salome, not from the Bible, but from the writings of the secular historian Josephus. Of course, we should cut Mark a little slack on the name issue, because the first-century Herodians have one of the most twisted and tangled family trees in history. Herodias is Herod the Great’s granddaughter, who first marries Herod the Great’s son, Herod Philip (who is, that’s right, her own uncle), and, then, upon Herod Philip’s death, remarries his brother, named Herod Antipas, who is also her uncle. Thank God Herodias herself thought a little outside the box when it came to baby names.

But her baby, her daughter, no matter her name and no matter how tantalizing her character might be, is not the central figure in this story. The main character here is not Salome, or her mother Herodias; it is not really even John the Baptist, despite the fact that part of the point of story is to explain John’s death. No, the lead character of this story is, somewhat surprisingly, Herod himself. The entire story centers on Herod – his perspective, his actions, his feelings. We hear that Herod is worried about this Jesus he’s been hearing so much about, guessing – wrongly – that he is some strangely recent reincarnation of John the Baptist, whom Herod himself has just had killed. We learn that Herod had actually liked listening to John the Baptist while he was alive, even if his words had confused and frightened him. We see that when John had denounced Herod’s pretzel of a family tree, Herod had tried to protect him from his own vengeful wife by throwing him in the relative safety of prison. We sense Herod’s insane desire for his stepdaughter and his intense frustration when he realized how he had been duped. Throughout this entire passage, it is Herod we come to know best, Herod’s perspective, Herod’s feelings, Herod’s actions. Herod is far, far from heroic, but he is the hero – the deeply flawed, deeply confused, deeply sinful hero – of this story.

But why in the world is this story so much about Herod? Why does Mark present this story from his point of view? Why not use John’s point of view – after all, he’s a character that we actually care about. Why not describe John’s long wait in the dark dampness of the prison, his prayers, his consolation, his courage in continuing to proclaim God’s truth to Herod’s power? Why tell us so much about Herod if he is such an anti-hero? The answer to this question, I believe, lies in the verses of Mark’s Gospel that bookend this story. Just before this passage, Mark describes Jesus’ calling of the twelve and sending them out in pairs to proclaim the message of repentance and to offer healing in his name. We learn that the disciples have gone out and preached the word of God, and that that word has been heard and has changed lives. And the verses that immediately follow the passage we heard today pick up this same thread, describing the disciples joyfully sharing the good news of all that they had done, telling their Lord Jesus how the word they had preached had changed the world.

But sandwiched right in the middle of these stories of powerful, effective discipleship, is the story of Herod, a man who hears the word and has absolutely no idea what to do with it, a man who perhaps could have been a disciple if he had just had the courage to open his heart and let the word in. Herod is a foil for faith, a negative image of all of the people who heard the word and actually listened. It isn’t as if Herod doesn’t know that John the Baptist is speaking the word of God. He knows that John is a holy man rightly dividing the word of truth, and yet he cannot – or will not – allow that word to break in to his own soul. He cannot – or will not – allow that word to change him. And so he does the only thing he can do – he takes that word and hides it away, locking it out of sight, where there is no risk that it might actually do something, might actually change him or his family or his world. Herod tries to force that word into a form of his own choosing, shaping it in his own image. He stuffs it into the darkness of a dungeon in the hopes that when it comes back into the light it might look more like he wants it to look and sound more like he wants it to sound. No matter how much his soul is drawn to this wild and wooly wilderness prophet, Herod can never really hear what John has to say. He never lets the word in; he never allows himself to be open enough to actually listen. And so his story ends in tragedy, with neighbor manipulating neighbor, with a beautiful, God-created body transmuted into an object of destruction, with deception, and death, and a body laid in a tomb with no hope of an Easter morning.

Imagine what it would have been like if the Herod’s story had been different. Imagine what it would have taken for Herod to hear the word and to risk real change. Imagine how he might have found the courage to say to John, “I hear you, but your words frighten me. Help me to live without fear; help me to repent, to change, to mold my life in the shape of your proclamation. Give me a word, and give me the power to let that word create in me a new life of repentance and forgiveness, of listening and of love, of power in weakness, of brothers and sisters in Christ, of a family shaped by the tree of the cross – a life where there is no more making an idol out of human flesh, no more trickery, confusion, and fear. Speak, John. Speak, prophet, for the servant of the living God is listening.”

Imagine what it would have taken for Herod to change, to let the Word change him. And now imagine what it might take for you to do the same thing. Imagine what it might take for you to let yourself be truly and forever changed. For you have heard the word this morning – you have heard it spoken and sung, proclaimed in your midst, and you will meet the Word made flesh at this altar. What would it be like to let that Word in and be changed?

We all know how easy it is to live like Herod, to hear the word and have no idea what to do with it because of our own stubbornness and fear. We all know how easy it is to try to stuff the word of God down into some private prison in our hearts and to bring it into the light only on Sundays, or when we are in pain, or when we already feel safe, or when we need something, or when we are surrounded by people who already agree with us. But this morning, God is inviting us into a still more excellent way – to let that word go free, to let that word truly reign in our hearts, to let that word shape every word we speak, every action we take, every emotion we feel – to let that word truly change us.

This is a bold thing to contemplate, to truly let the word of God in. It takes courage to listen, courage to let ourselves be molded to the shape of that word. It takes courage to change. But here is something that just might help: we are, in fact, already changed. We are already changed. This is the hope that we find in Christ – we are already changed; Christ’s death and resurrection have changed everything, God’s adopting us as heirs of Christ has changed everything, the Holy Spirit’s movement in the Church and in our own baptisms has already changed everything. We are already changed from now into everlasting life, and this is a change that we can believe in. So why not live like it? Why not let ourselves live in harmony with that truth? Why not fearlessly fling open the doors of our hearts and let the word of God really, truly, beautifully, wonderfully, miraculously change us? Why not give that word center stage and refuse to look anywhere else, and let that word dance?

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

15 July 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia