Saint Mark's Church

In 1905 a Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein published in a few short months, four papers the ramifications of which he would spend the rest of his life untangling and which forever changed our world, not least of which because the nuclear possibilities inherent in his thought.

When I think about the inspiration involved, I always have a feeling of vertigo. Any one of these papers would have been enough to earn Einstein the Nobel prize in physics which he won in 1921, but to have four ideas of such magnitude in a few short months, to be able to condense them and publish them while toiling away in obscurity makes my brain hurt.

But whenever I think of one of the theories, I have another wave of vertigo. One of the papers that Einstein wrote lays out what has been called his special theory of relativity and sets aside any absolute theory of structure and movement in the universe. Every motion is measured in relation to a relative point, and this has dizzying ramifications for space and time.

Until Einstein, physicists had been tying themselves in knots attempting to create a grand unified scheme to describe motion across all of space and time.

Einstein simply cut through that Gordian knot with the simple assertion that all motion and movement is relative to whatever point you are using as a reference. It was a commonsensical and elegantly simple solution to a complex problem.Instead of Cartesian geometry and coordinates, and Newtonian physics, in which all motion is relative to two or three central axes, and which all seems so commonsensical to us, everything is relative to its frame of reference, and occurs in a kind of terrifying freedom which it is much harder to describe or predict, whose rules seem alien to us.

We have, in two of our readings today, a similar sense of terrifying freedom. From this letter written to the nascent Church in Galatia, we have a discussion of the freedom that is made ours in the coming of Jesus. Under the old system, "the Newtonian physics" of religion before Jesus came into the world, our relationship with the Creator was defined by a specific and complex set of interactions which hinged on our ability to maintain a strict set of rules and laws, and to atone for our sins through a sacrificial system, through a system of sacrifice and ritual cleansing and atonement.

This is the law given to Moses that the Gospel according to John speaks of this morning. The Law was given, and then in the fullness of time, the Word, the very being and core of God, enfleshed, comes into the world, and that system of law, atonement and sacrifice is fulfilled permanently, for God, taking on our flesh has destroyed the massive "otherness" between humanity and God, and pushed us out into the terrifying freedom and vertigo of the life of grace.

A funny thing happened when Einstein produced those four papers in a few short months. At first no one noticed, and then no one thought he was right, and finally no one could look at the world the same way. Even so with this magnificent event whose anniversary we celebrated this week.Jesus has come to be with us. God has come into the pain and struggle of human life, and in so doing, has redeemed it and made it beautiful and powerful, and has set our existence flaming with a light that the darkness can never dim. The light has come into the world, and burning with a scaring brilliance, has penetrated into the deepest corners of darkness.

At first no one noticed that Jesus had come, and then no one thought he was God, and then no one could look at the world the same way again, for his coming had so altered the way we see things that suddenly there was no return. For his coming cast light into all the corners of the world that had been hid before.

There is a phrase from the Gospel this morning that always strikes me with force. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not over come it." For those of you who remember the old translation, it is "The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." But the effect is the same, there is an event that is ongoing, and the response, the reaction is past tense. The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness attempted, and failed to overcome it, to understand, and so the light shines still.

It is hard sometimes, to think about the light still shining. Surely we find ourselves in a similar darkness to that of Judea during the first century of this era: in the midst of violence, economic crisis, racial tensions.Surely, we have difficulty seeing and believing that the light shines.

And yet the light has burst forth, it has blazed like magnesium ribbon and our retinas are still burning with the vision of it, despite the external indicators that the darkness has overcome the light.

By blazing out with brilliance the light has shown us a new and terrifying freedom and grace. No longer do we need the discipline of the law to keep us out of dangerous and dark corners, for we live in the midst of a world redeemed and yet hurting, a world in which we can see into the dark corners and know them for what they are: dark, yet loved, waiting and longing for us to bear that light of Christ which lives in us into them and set them ablaze and shimmering with light and power.

There is a funny thing about light. You can see the source of light, and you can see where the light strikes, but you cannot actually see light. When it passes through dust or fog or mist, you can see its trail, but light itself is invisible. That is why the world seems so dark. We can see the source of that burning brilliance, Jesus the Word, and we can see where that light shines, in the darkness around the world, and down into the midst of Philadelphia, but we cannot see how extensive its reach, how broad its arc, how full of energy and warmth that light is.

And so, in some ways, our calling seems inexplicable, our course madness. Those who cannot see the source or the actual light have no idea what we do here. But we have seen his glory, and the seeming foolishness of our course is nothing when we look at it in the light which has blazed into the world.

Like Einstein, toiling away in obscurity, and finally having the genius intuition to simply scrub the whole unified motion problem, we operate here in intuitive ways. For we have seen his glory. We have seen the radiance of his coming into the world, and we have seen where his light shines. We have been adopted and made heirs of him, and we speak now to God, not as Lord or King or Judge, but as “Abba,” as Daddy.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew N. Ashcroft

28 December 2008

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is the rhyme that children chant in the schoolyard, during recess. But we learn, early on as children, that words do in fact hurt, and can heal. Words create whole worlds, and destroy them with a disturbing ease. Think of words like “I do.” “Go to hell!” or “I have a dream.”

Human beings use words with power. How much more so for God? Indeed, running throughout the Scriptures is a God who speaks. In a tone of the very first things Scripture tells us that God creates by using words. God speaks and worlds become. “Let there be light and there was light.” God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, and to Israel through the judges and prophets. There is something fundamental about God which is about speaking, about language and about words.

It is natural that John turns to the metaphor of language when wrestling not only with what Jesus did and what happened in the life of Jesus, but with who Jesus is and what Jesus means. Luke which we read last night records a different version of the Christmas story, Jesus was born in squalid conditions, there were signs and wonders which surrounded his birth, Herod the local ruler got a bit exercised about the talk about his birth, shepherds, angels, stars, all that has come to be recognized and over advertised in our culture today, all that which comes out for Christmas pageants and Christmas cards.

But this morning’s gospel reading hasn’t inspired many nativity plays or Christmas cartoons.John’s account is rather abstract, after all. John, writing seventy or a hundred years after the other Gospels is attempting to come to terms with the assertion and intuition that the Church has that the baby in the manger is not just a prophet or a sage, not just a hill country preacher, but somehow God, come down to live among us. So the writer to Gospel of John or the editor collecting the writings begins the work with the passage that we heard read this morning, the abstract and famous piece which seems to be one of the earliest recorded Christian hymns.

“In the beginning, was the Word,” and immediately we run up against the barrier of language. The Greek word here for “word” is “logos” and “logos is a little hard to translate. It means not simply speech like “Hi, how are you?” or “The sky is blue.” In Greek, “logos” denotes something that is concerned and linked to being, to the innermost places of our hearts and lives. The Greek word has given birth to our word “logic” and that somehow makes for a much better sense of what the composer of the hymn is trying to convey. Jesus is the intimate logic of God, the core being and principle, inscribed in flesh for us.

In college I took a linguistics class and while I've lost or repressed a great deal of what I learned then, there is one concept from modern language theory which has always fascinated me. The idea that there are some speech acts which are substantively different from most of the language that we use. Most of the time we use language as filler – we use it simply to describe, or to communicate something obvious: the dog is brown or the sky is blue or the egg on my breakfast plate is hot. But modern language theorists call certain parts of our speech "performative utterance," a performative utterance is the speech act that actually does something; rather than describing reality that is, performative utterances create reality by speaking. Like a magic spell from a fairy tale, by speaking the words we bring about what we say. When we stand across from another person and say "I take you to be my wife or my husband," we aren't simply describing a relationship that already exists, by speaking those words we are actually marrying someone. When we take a new child and wash them in the waters of Baptism and proclaim the words "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," we are doing precisely that, joining a lovely little one into the Church and making them one with the Body of Christ. When Sean or I are standing as the focus of this community gathered, and we say "This is my Body" or "This is my Blood" we are not describing a mystery or enacting a ritual; we as a body, as clergy and laity, are making of bread and wine, the Body and Blood of our Lord.

Performative utterance unites intention and action in a marvelous and powerful way, where saying becomes doing, and doing saying; where speech and action are one.

Which may seem like rather an abstract way to get around to talking about something substantive this morning. It is hard for me to imagine that a host of you are going to go home and, in response to the question about what the sermon this morning was about, reply “Performative utterance.” But sometimes I think the only way to understand this famous passage from John is to think of it in rather unusual terms.

Jesus is the performative utterance of God, the Word who, simply by being spoken, draws us into the heart of God.  Jesus is the word whose speech creates the world and Jesus is the word whose speech redeems the world.  Jesus is the intimate logic of God, the sentence who interrupts our darkness with a word of light that creates light,  a word of peace that creates peace, a word of love that creates love.

As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we are celebrating the Incarnation, that powerful and tremendous blending of speech and action, where doing and saying become one. Where God’s speech act, God’s logic, that word which is at the core of God’s being becomes fully human and comes to live and be with us in our frailty and our humanity.

And the world is never the same again. For we have seen his glory, we have heard that word roll out like thunder. He unites earth and heaven. He becomes human that we might become divine. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.”

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew N. Ashcroft

Christmas Day 2008

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Imagine, for a second, that you are standing in the middle of the desert. You’ve been dragged out to this God-forsaken place by your cousin, who is always off following some other itinerant preacher, or trying out the latest diet fad, or ordering what he thinks will be the next great product from the Home Shopping Network to shove into your Christmas stocking. He’s brought you out to see “the latest guy,” a man named John who is preaching and ritually cleansing people in the desert.  John is quite a sight. His hair and beard are wild. He smells and he is wearing a camel hair shirt, which is possibly the only thing that smells worse than a real live camel. He lives on locusts and honey, which is certainly not the most complete, balanced diet in the world, and he is flirting with annoying the wrong kind of people with some of his ill-advised comments about King Herod and his new wife.

John is proclaiming what strange preachers often proclaim, the imminent arrival of God’s Messiah, who will right the wrongs of Israel, will finally makes sure that Israel isn’t constantly getting beat up by the bigger bullies all around, or used as a cross-roads between Africa, Asia and Europe. It is what the strange religious types have been yelling about for hundreds and hundreds of years, to anyone who would listen to them, that and sin and repentance, and John is no different in that either.He washes people to remove their sins, and he talks about the need to return again to faithfulness with God.And he draws a crowd, as strange prophet types tend to do. Some are there because they like the spectacle; some are like your cousin, always looking for the next big thing. Some are there because they feel some guilt in their life and would like not to feel it anymore, and sacrificing in the Temple didn’t make them feel any better, so maybe this John character will be able to.

What would you think, looking out on that desert scene? Would you think “John is right. The Messiah is coming soon. I need to prepare myself.” Or would you think what most people probably thought: “This guy has spent a little too long in the desert sun without a hat. He’s got a screw loose.”

John is not different from the other prophets throughout the years that preached to Israel, and were ignored and laughed at and mocked and killed. John is the last of them, but no different. They came to tell Israel about its sin and failure (which everyone loves to have pointed out to them). They came to tell Israel to return to faithful covenant with God, or risk destruction. They came talking about the Messiah long promised, long expected, who never ever seemed to arrive.

Like John they all looked, or at least acted more than a little crazy.  And like John they found their mission, their calling excruciating and onerous and dangerous. Not easy, to be the mouthpiece of God. To have your fellow prophets killed, to be the last prophetic voice in the land. To have to declare to a people that you love and belong to (or at least used to belong to until you started prophesying) their sin and the coming wrath. Or even worse, to be sent to preach repentance to your sworn enemies, and then when they repented and God was merciful, to feel bitterly angry that God had not destroyed them. Or to write into your own life and marriage the infidelity of the people of Israel to their covenanted God, to take a harlot as wife, as the kind brutal symbol of God’s relationship with the people that he loved and pursued, and who constantly spurned and were faithless to him. Not easy being a prophet of God and you can tell when we read their words out in the midst of this place. They are simultaneously extremely disturbing and profoundly comforting. When they bring to us words of comfort, they are soft words, words about the end of our sojourn in the wilderness, about the ending of our trial and testing and punishment. They speak words of profound comfort – the restoration of what should be, the putting down of those who oppress us, the binding up of the sick, the lame and the poor.“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.”

But when they prophesy against us – we feel and justly feel – condemned. For our pride, our faithlessness, our idolatry, our injustice, our greed. And even though their voices come to us out of the dust, and out of the complex politics of ancient near eastern kingdoms and wars, still it is hard not to blanch slightly when we hear them railing.

For they speak not only about injustice and idolatry and greed and sin (which is enough in itself), but about the shortness of our lives and the tininess of our beings before the abundant power and majesty of God.“All the people are grass,” says Isaiah, and “the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” And indeed it has proved true. Although Isaiah is long since under earth, and crumbled away to ashes, the words that he spoke, attempting to crystallize in language the compulsion that he felt from God, those words come down to us still.

And they resonate with us.Despite innumerable years and miles, still we feel their condemnation. We are not much different from Israel.Still we are an unclean people, faithless often to our God, full of sin and greed and idolatry and injustice.Spurning the poor, the widows and the orphans, and offering up our sacrifices at altars other than this one.

And still we are in need of God’s comfort, God’s grace, God’s mercy to break into the squalid little messes of our lives and restore us again. “Will you not turn again, O God? Will you not remember your people?” We need the words of comfort which the prophets offer us.

But most of all we need what the prophets spoke of and longed for and knew that they would never see, in their sad poignancy and in their waiting for God to do something, to do anything, to restore Israel; we need a Savior, a Messiah, that One expected from the foundations of the world.

And so John stands in the desert, looking into the distance, the last of a long line of prophets, doing what they have done for so long: waiting. Waiting for God to act.Waiting for the Messiah to arrive.Waiting for the people to get it together. Waiting in the midst of that moment of calm before the storm, of pregnant pause, of held breath and deep anticipation. Waiting for that secret moment, that mystery beyond mysteries, which will redeem all the suffering of the prophets and of Israel, which will restore the fortunes of Zion, make of the desert a garden and gather the lambs in God’s arms.He proclaims what the prophets before him have proclaimed: Repent, turn again to God, there is One coming who is more powerful than I. I am not worthy to untie his sandals.He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

He says these things wearily, and looking into the haze of the desert, wonders sometimes, about the truth of the words which flow through him. Whether indeed that Messiah will ever come. Whether God will ever redeem his people and turn again to them. Whether the desert and the life of a prophet will get him before Herod does. Whether the waiting will ever end.

Somewhere, just over the horizon, is another man, a God-man coming out to meet John. And the path that John preaches, the path that he is attempting to smooth with harsh words and ritual cleansing, that path will stretch as straight as an arrow, from the moment that the God-man comes up from the water of baptism, directly to Jerusalem and a hill outside it.

John will be gone by then, of course. His head will be on a platter and the agony of being a prophet ended. But his eyes will have seen something that the prophets longed and waited for, against all hope. [The savior of the world, God’s messiah.]

For now, John simply looks out into the distant desert, and hopes and waits, and waits, and waits, for God to bring about his purposes.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

7 December 2008

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

 Sometimes, when I read the news or listen to some of the rhetoric which goes on in our church, or other churches, or other faiths, I have the distinct sense that the Scriptures are some of the most dangerous works ever set to paper, parchment, vellum, clay or stone. Wars have been fought, people are being killed, incredibly cruel and brutal things are being screamed, over the ways that holy writings are interpreted and read and passed on generation to generation.

And there are times when it seems that biblical literalism is stalking our age: people who are willing to justify many horrendous ideas and actions, in the name of their so-called literal reading of the Scriptures.

 I don’t know if any of you ever watched the television series, The West Wing, when it was on television, but there is one scene from it which I remember vividly because it dealt with the whole issue of biblical literalism. At an event at the White House, the presidential character comes across a “Christian” talk radio personality. The subject of human sexuality comes up and she quotes to him from the Scriptures, chapter and verse. To which he responds with this set of questions:

I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, and always clears the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff insists on working on the Sabbath, Exodus 35:2, clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important, 'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes us unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother, John, for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?

It is a funny scene, and the point is to highlight the inconsistency in taking certain portions of Scripture literally when it comes to sexuality, or the role of women, but not a vast number of other portions of the Scriptures.

 It is part of the strangeness of American religion that we have been deeply affected by the rhetoric of fundamentalism which says that the Bible is literally true and its meaning is obvious; that the Scriptures say what they mean, and there is no contradiction, no complexity of interpretation to them; that what matters is how I understand the Scriptures. I like to think of this as the approach which I have heard spoken which says “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”

And even when we know intellectually that that is not the case, when we understand there to be issues of interpretation and a host of other issues which make reading the Scriptures difficult, still we react slightly when we hear the Scriptures being proof-texted, or blanch slightly when someone mentions St. Paul.

One can see in the two modern responses to the Scriptures, either to accept the Scriptures whole-heartedly and supposedly literally, or to explain them away in profoundly deep and (I think) dangerous ways, the cumulative effects of the rhetoric of Biblical literalism.

But Biblical literalism is a relatively modern way of reading the Scriptures and a dangerous one.The early church was much clearer than we are that the Scriptures were dangerous, and were not primarily to be read and interpreted individually, but to be read and interpreted within the gathered community, the body of the Church.

In contradistinction to the simple literalism around the Scriptures or the simple dismissal of the Scriptures which we see today, the collect appointed for today gives us a method of interacting with Scripture in a far more complex and nuanced way.

Rite I

Blessed Lord, who has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them; that, by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.

Rite II

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.

And I love this collect not only because my father used to quote it to me all the time (one of the dangers of growing up in a clerical family), but also because I find it tremendously helpful when I open up the Scriptures, ready to write a sermon, and come across the inevitable difficult passage.

I am most enamored with the phrase “inwardly digest” the Scriptures. It is a gustatory metaphor for coming to grips with the Scriptures. We are to ingest, to ruminate, to chew the cud of the Scriptures in a bovine manner for hours, days, years, even our lifetimes. And notice that the collect is couched in the language of the people of God reading and wrestling with the Scriptures together, as a body. This is not something that I do on my own.

Which is good news as far as I am concerned when I read the Gospel passage for today. The parable of the talents is a relatively straightforward passage about stewardship and the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom is like a rich man who goes away and leaves his property in the charge of his servants or slaves. They are given his property to care for, for a time, which is precisely what stewardship is: caring for that which is not yours, which you will have to give back or return eventually. The two worthy servants increase the master’s property by their thoughtful care for it. The “wicked” servant merely buries his talent and gets punished for his terrible stewardship.

But then we come to that disturbing phrase: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” It is a phrase that I will freely admit I am fundamentally uncomfortable with. My temptation is to attempt to explain it away or, using rhetorical slight-of-hand gloss over it or interpret it. But I’m not sure that I can do that convincingly, and even if I could, I’m not sure that would be very helpful, and so what I am left with is a difficult, difficult piece of the Scriptures. Scripture not as simple or clear or evident, but “an illegible stone,” with complex directions and dimensions, a confusing text which I cannot easily solve or explain.

If the way to read the Scriptures is, as the collect says, to “inwardly digest them,” that wonderful metaphor of feasting on the Word, what do we do with the pieces of Scripture which catch in our throats, which stick in our gullets, as we attempt to swallow them, to chew on them?

“...those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away...” That doesn’t sound like the Jesus who was deeply concerned with the poor, the exile and the outcast. And I find it difficult to reconcile all this discussion of binding and casting into the outer darkness, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, with my understanding of the God of mercy.

The literal reader of the Scriptures would say of this passage that it points to the judgment of God, God’s purity, God’s holiness, God’s otherness from the human race. The other brand of interpretation might try and explain the phrase away, or make out that it was a later interpolation by the community reading and preserving the Gospel of Matthew, in response to X, Y or Z going on in their communal lives or in their identity struggles with the Judaism of their day.

Both of these methods of interpreting the Scriptures are ways of foreclosing on the process of the inward digestion of Scripture, and the ongoing reading and ingesting of Scripture in the midst of the community of the faithful. Both are attempts to make simple what is not simple, to make clear what is not clear, to make black and white that which is grey. To set boundaries, to set limits, to define the ways in which we interact with the Scriptures, the questions and emotions and experiences that we bring to them.

It is, I think, much safer to know that Scripture is simple, clear and literal, or that Scripture can be explained away as the cultural literature, poetry and myths of some ancient tribes. There is less at stake, when I don’t have to be open to the Scriptures reading me back, questioning me back, about my relationship with money, about God’s judgment, about my own personal holiness, and about our holiness as a community of faith. And therein lies the problem with the modern ways of reading the Scriptures.They are not really reading the Scriptures at all, they are not really open to the Scriptures; they aren’t reading the Scriptures in anyway which allows of the Scriptures reading back into us.

And so, lest I attempt to use rhetorical flourish not to attempt to come to grips with “...those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away...” I will now attempt to share with you the place where I am, when it comes to wrestling with that particular phrase of the Scriptures. It is very difficult for me to accept, for me to integrate into the conception that I have of Jesus and of God. I find that this phrase sits in my mind alongside those phrases which assume slavery and the subjugation of women, which justify homophobia and xenophobia. I cannot accept them, but I also cannot simply dismiss them.They point to the complexity of the God of the Scriptures, of the person of Jesus, revealed to us in documents which are troubling and difficult. Nothing would make me happier than to know that Jesus is the liberal intellectual that my conception has made him, or that God is who I think he is. But it is the hard passages of Scripture which point to the limitations of my own images of God and of Christ.

 Grant us therefore, Gracious Lord, so to hear the complexity and hardness of the Scriptures, so to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, so to ruminate on their difficult words and stories, their cultural insensitivities and their unquestioned assumptions, that we may find in them that “patience and comfort” which has been the Church’s hope for long ages.

For one thing is certain. Whether we like the Scriptures or not, or are comfortable with them or not (generally I think we are not), out of the Scriptures come our common life, our practice, and our hope. Out of the Scriptures, however distant or complex, however hard or convoluted, comes to us the voice of the Living God, speaking into our world, our hearts and minds, our very beings. It has been so for untold years, that those who gather together to worship and praise the living God have in their reflection and rumination on the Scriptures, heard the rumor of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Preached by the Rev'd Andrew Ashcroft

16 November 2008

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Feasting really has gone out of fashion in this day and age. Do we really ever get invited to a feast? We go to formal dinners occasionally, but we are far more likely to inhale a TV dinner or a handful of Chicken McNuggets by ourselves then we are to sit down to a meal with a large group of people. And I’m not even sure that merely a large group qualifies as a feast. There is in the word “feasting” a sense of solemnity, of length, of plenty, of laughter, of toasting, and of overwhelming abundance. A feast isn’t really a feast without huge sides of meat, without vast trays of delicacies, barrels of beer and vast amounts of wine, and the obligatory roast pig with an apple in its mouth. Feasting is not for those who are closely examining their waistlines or are in bondage to nutritionists.

A feast is what we imagine pirates doing, after a successful day of pillaging; or Vikings, boasting of their exploits in battle. There is, in short, in feasting a certain roughness or gruffness; a quality of being slightly out of control, slightly wild. A feast is more like a fraternity party and less like a Norman Rockwell-esque Thanksgiving Dinner.

We, certainly do not feast. We, frozen chosen Episcopalians would look slightly askance at too great a display of emotion, that kind of wildness at a social event. We gather certainly, for communal dinners, but really, feasting is a bit passé and bit rustic. We would be forced to yell at our companions across the table, and listen to their slightly off-color jokes. Feasting might make us slightly uncomfortable and exposed.

But we must learn to feast, because if the Scriptures that we read today are correct, feasting is our final goal and delight. Feasting is our future.

It is unfortunate that feasting has left our experience, because it is a preeminent and much used image throughout the Scriptures; a way of talking about the incomprehensible and unimaginable future that God is preparing for his beloved people; a way of talking about heaven.

First, in the passage that we heard from Isaiah, we have the wonderful image of the mountaintop feast, where God gathers all peoples and makes for them a feast of rich food filled with marrow and well-aged wines strained clear. The feast is a celebration, because in the future which God prepares for all peoples, the sadness of life and sorrow of death are removed and God wipes the tears from our faces.

And Lord knows that we need to be reminded of this hope, as we have watched the stock markets and the financial markets of the world crumble, as we have watched our own savings dwindle and people all around us struggle to make ends meet.

Lord knows that we need an abundant feast, as people are struggling to find the money to feed themselves and their loved ones.

Lord knows that there are many, many tears on our faces, as we look at a world and a city filled with violence and poverty.

And the Lord does know all that, and there is tremendous and vast hope in knowing that our sadness and our cries are not ignored and that the day of feasting and an end to sadness is coming.

But the hope of that day is not just pie in the sky. The passage from Isaiah is about what God will do, at some future moment. The parable from the Gospel of Matthew this morning is about what God has already done in Jesus. The kingdom of heaven, which has come near us, which is among us, is like a wedding feast. A wedding feast which was RSVP only, but when those guests failed to come, to which all are invited, those worthy and those unworthy.

At first blush, this parable seems to portray the king as an arbitrary and angry ruler, who has simply decided to have a party, and if he has to force the guests to come, he is powerful and will do it. When he finds a guest who isn’t dressed correctly, he tosses him out of the feast. Is this really how God is? Arbitrary, petulant and dangerous?

But no, of course God is not like that, nor is that the meaning of the parable. The feast, you see, is the most important thing; the feast is the end and purpose of our life, what we were made for. That restlessness and sense that we sometimes have of not quite being home; that is because we were made for the feast, and instead we are in the midst of fasting and suffering. The feast is the reversal of the Fall, the return to Eden, rest after long labor, the period at the end of the sentence. And so to have an invitation to the feast and not go, or to go and not be ready for the feast is a drastic and massive failing. It is like having tickets to see the Phillies play in Game 7 of the World Series (God willing) and instead decide to go to a movie, or stay home and watch the game on television.

What the parable is teaching is the necessity of being ready when that great and glorious day, long hid from our sight comes. That day when we are invited into the festal hall of the King with all sorts and conditions of people, and showered with food and drink to celebrate the end of death and the healing of grief.

What we are about this morning is preparing for the Feast. What we do here at the altar is a kind of mini-feast, a practice feast, a way to get ourselves ready for that final, eternal feast. We gather as all sorts and conditions of people, we gather however worthy or unworthy we feel. We gather, business people and paupers, young and old, many races; all the peoples that God has made. We gather and are made one and become a sign and symbol of what we were created for: the feast to end all feasts and the party to end all parties.

What we do as the church, as the People of the Way gathered here is both preparation for and participation in that great and glorious day hid from our sight. This mass is an image, an icon of the Wedding Feast of our God, the Supper of the Lamb, in which our God spreads out a feast for us, wipes away our tears and showers down upon us the abundant food and drink of eternity.

Though we cannot see it, and though so much of our world seems dark, we are already in the outer chambers of the king’s palace. Already the feast has begun and we wait only for the doors to swing open to admit us into the gathering; that great crowd of witnesses which none can number.

Come then, come to the Feast; prepare yourselves for heavenly food and drink. The rich food will be upon the altar, the well-aged wine in the chalice. With this feast, God will wipe away our tears, not for the last time, but for time being; with this feast we will be strengthened, for the work ahead of us, to go out into the world, to comfort those who mourn and bind up the broken-hearted, to be with the sick, the friendless and the needy, to work for the restoration of the Kingdom, that we may be ready when that great and glorious day is upon us.

Preached by the Rev’d Andrew Ashcroft

12 October 2008

St. Mark’s Church, Philadelphia