Saint Mark's Church

You may listen to Fr. Mullen's sermon here.

A widow haunts my dreams these days.  But she is not the widow of Zarephath who we heard about this morning, who although she was about to starve to death herself, fed the prophet Elijah her last morsels of food, and found that God supplied sustenance to keep her and her son and the prophet alive.  And she is not the widow who puts her two cents into the treasury – what we used to call the widow’s mite – who we heard about in Mark’s Gospel this morning.  Neither of these is the widow that haunts me.

She’s a widow about whom I have not told you before today, although I imagine that some of you have harbored suspicions about her, others have wondered, but been afraid to guess, afraid to hope.  You have thought it rude to wonder too much about her circumstances.  There is this widow, you see, who lived a simple life.  She’d been a widow so long that no one could even remember her husband; we just assumed she’d had one long ago, because she was always referred to as a “widow.”  She was never well-known.  You are struggling to remember her name, even now, but I think you know where she sat in church – nowhere obvious, always off on one of the side aisles.  She had not many friends, but she was a faithful church-goer.  And you would have supposed (if you stopped to suppose such things) that she was a faithful, if not extravagant, supporter of the church.  She made the kind of financial contribution that will be missed, but will not be a disastrous loss.  This makes sense, since you and I always believed that she had enough, but not too much, if you know what I mean.  We have heard about widows like this before: gentle, quiet, unassuming women in their communities.  Almost entirely un-remarkable while they are alive.  But in death their great secret is revealed – and it is always the same secret, although the details may vary.

Have you guessed who the widow is, yet?  Can you picture her in your mind’s eye?  Do you remember now if she sat on your side of the church or the other side?  Have you remembered her name?  Do you remember wondering if she was childless, too.  No heirs to consider.  Or was she?  Wasn’t there someone sitting next to her at Christmas and Easter?  A child, home for the holidays?  Or a nephew, a niece?  Maybe there was a family and they were just kept at bay?  Or stayed at bay of their own accord?  Hard to say.  Hard to know the details of the life of someone so private, so quiet, so nearly anonymous.

When she began to invade my dreams, I looked for stories about women like her, because I knew I had come across them before.  Here is what a simple search uncovered:

In the Pacific Northwest, in a coastal town in Washington state, a 98-year-old woman died, and directed that the small fortune of $4.5 million she had amassed all be spent to improve her little seaside town.

In Lake Lillian, Minnesota, a 97-year-old woman left in her will, the sum of about $6 million to be spent in her community of 238 people.  (That’s more than $25,000 per person, if they just divvied it up!)

In Lake Forest, Illinois, a 100-year-old woman died and left $7 million to her alma mater, a little, local college.

In Scotland, an 83-year-old spinster (as the Scots insisted on calling her) left 1.8 million pounds sterling the SPCA.

Back in California, a 96-year-old woman left $1.7 million to the Salvation Army.

Now do you remember the widow who has been so much on my mind?

We have all heard these stories.  And some of us have heard the stories that never make it into the papers – stories about churches just like Saint Mark’s that are the beneficiaries of the largesse of these secret millionaires, these little old ladies who have been preparing a surprise for their lucky churches.  What church doesn’t dream that such a secret millionaire will shower her generosity on it? 

When such a widow has been in your own midst, and on your mind, you start to wonder about her.  What made her the way she is?

Widows, of course, have been hurt by loss.  They are defined by something missing in their lives, by a relationship they once had but now they can only long for.  Widows have suffered.  They know something of pain and brokenness.  They know loneliness, too.  And they know what it is like to plead with God for mercy, to beg God to make things turn out differently, to fix something that is beyond their own ability to fix, even though they have fixed a great deal in their lives before.  Widows know what it feels like to be weak, and at the end of their rope.  They know what it feels like to run out of hope.  They know what it feels like to consider the possibility that God has deserted them, along with everybody else.  Widows know what it feels like to conclude that they must now get on with something – with life – on their own, without any help, with the possibility of much joy, without much hope of promise.  They know resignation, maybe despair.  Virtue is often attributed to widows – a characteristic they do not always think they deserve.  It is earned, I suppose, through acceptance, which is sometimes manifest in a kind of wisdom.

And some widows, apparently, are shrewd investors, or careful savers, or maybe just cheapskates – but by whatever means they reach a certain age with a certain fortune.  Some widows are these secret millionaires, who keep their wealth a secret, but whose generosity is eventually revealed.

Boy, do we love those widows!  Everyone dreams that such a widow inhabits their small town, their little college, or the church they belong to. 

Have you ever dreamt that such a widow was a part of the congregation here at Saint Mark’s?

And when you have noticed that there are things that need to be done, work you imagine we could accomplish – whether it’s tending to the buildings, or establishing new programs, or caring for the needy – have you hoped, as I have, that there was among us a secret millionaire: a widow whose name you don’t know, but who is probably sitting over there on the side aisle, under her hat or her veil, whose generosity will eventually provide for all that we need as a parish?

Oh, I have had those dreams!

I have wondered about one or two of you.  But, of course, the secret wealth was to be found where I least expected it.  I thought she had barely two nickels to rub together – two pennies, like the widow in the Gospel.  But how I underestimated her!

Have you guessed at the identity of the widow in our midst?

My friends, my dear ones, you know the widow yourselves, for you are the widow.

I know you lead a straightforward life; not a lot of extravagances.  Some of you feel un-known, or un-noticed; some of you want to stay that way.  You are not old, but you have lived enough of life to learn a thing or two.  Some of you have families, but it has been a long time since your kids were in church with you except on holidays.  You wonder if they will ever find their way back to the church.  You are a faithful church-goer – as faithful as you can be with all the other demands on your time.  And you are not here for recognition or attention; you simply don’t require them.  And you know pain and loss in your life, don’t you?  You know suffering, brokenness and loneliness.  You know what it is like to plead with God for mercy, to make things turn out differently – whatever it is that drove you to your knees.  You know what it feels like to be weak and at the end of your rope.  You know what it feels like to run out of hope.  Maybe you know what it feels like to suspect that God has deserted you.  Maybe you know resignation; maybe despair.  Maybe you know that people attribute virtues to you that you do not think you deserve.

So it’s not that things have always been peachy for you.  You know this, and I know it , too.  You are the widow.

But – I hear you objecting - you are not wealthy, you have enough, generally speaking, but not too much.  You cannot afford to be extravagant.  You are happy to put in your two pennies – even more – but let’s be reasonable; you are no secret millionaire.

Maybe, maybe not.  I have no way of knowing.  Nor does it especially matter to me.

For here is the truth that Jesus is getting at when he points to a widow with her two pennies as an example, for “she, out of her poverty has put in everything she had.”  The wealth of the church lies in the generosity of those who give, and most of us have more to give than we are prepared to.

Interestingly, Jesus does not pull the widow aside and offer her a seminar in estate planning – though I am sure this would have been useful to her.  But he praises her for her generosity in the here and now.   He does not eye her quietly as the potential donor of a planned gift – though I’m sure he would be glad to help her fill out the paperwork to establish a deferred annuity trust (as I would be glad to help any of you do).  But he celebrates her generosity in the moment.

Jesus and the widow know the same thing: that she can afford to give as much as she wants, because everything she has came from God and everything she is going to have comes from God.  And God will provide.  So, sometimes, you just have to feel free in giving it away.

Most of us are relatively stingy, we are the wrong kind of widow – the kinds who hoard it for another day, willing to be praised in death for our careful planning, but not willing to risk being generous in life.

Don’t get me wrong, God accepts both kinds of generosity (and several kinds of credit cards).  But let me ask you this – what is going on with these secret millionaires?  What are they waiting for?  They were never going to use the money for themselves anyway.  It’s only a kind of neurosis that leaves them so rich at the end of their lives.

It is, of course, a lovely thing to be able to leave a generous fortune to your town, your school, your favorite charity… even your church, when you die.  But how much better to also be giving while you are alive.

What a shame that the widows who were secret millionaires never knew the feeling that the widow of Zarephath knew, or the widow with her two pennies in the Gospel.  What a shame they never knew the lightness in your step that you get from giving; never knew how tall they’d stand despite the toll that age had taken on their bones and their stature.

What a shame to sleep on a proverbial mattress full of money, nursing the secret suspicion that God doesn’t care about you, and would never provide for you.

You and I are widows, whose lives have known loss and pain and misery. And by the grace of God we have also known healing and comfort and love.  Maybe we are secret millionaires, maybe not.  Maybe that remains to be seen.  Maybe we have plans to leave a small or a great fortune to the church – that’s OK, I’m not trying to talk you out of it!  But let’s not be the wrong kind of widows.  Let’s not let our planning for death out-do our generosity in life.

And let’s not assume that all will be well when some other widow leaves her fortune to the church.

For you have a fortune, too, maybe smaller than the person next to you, maybe not.  And I have a fortune, too, by the grace of God.  And we can do a lot better than putting two pennies in, but we can’t do any better than that wonderful, anonymous widow who put in everything she had, and then went back to her pew, over in one of the side aisles, and said her prayers quietly, and thanked God for all that he had given her, and determined that next week she’d be back to do the same again, because doing so she felt better, more fully alive, when she gave away more than anyone thought she could afford.  And after all, everything she had came from God, and everything she was going to have would come from God.  And God will provide.  Why not give a goodly portion of it back to the One who gave it to us in the first place?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

11 November 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Phialdelphia

A recent book, written by a professor at the Harvard Medical School, purports in its title to provide “Proof of Heaven.”  The author is an experienced and distinguished neurosurgeon who contracted a rare brain illness and fell into a coma for seven days.  I have not read the book, though I’d like to.  I have heard Dr. Eben Alexander talk about his experience in a radio interview, and I must say it is quite remarkable.  According to promotional material for the book, “While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.”

The material difference between Dr. Alexander’s book and another recent book, “Heaven is for Real,” is that the former was written by a neurosurgeon and the latter is the account of a four-year-old boy whose near-death experience is recounted by his father.

Let the reader understand that the neurosurgeon is supposed to have greater credibility than the four-year-old boy.  This seems an open question to me, and perhaps it will seem so to other people of faith, too.  After all, Jesus never said of neurosurgeons that the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these, but I verge on digression.

The titles of both books seem to be answering questions that have not actually been on my mind.  Heaven is for Real?  Yes, thank you, I have been working with that assumption for quite a while.  Proof of Heaven was not something I was anxiously awaiting, nor would I have expected a considered treatment of such a thing to come from Harvard Medical School.

St. John the Divine received not a single degree from Harvard, nor is it widely suspected that he was in a coma when his vision of things to come was given to him.  We heard a bit of it tonight, particularly the tantalizing image of “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God….”  This image has captivated the Christian imagination for centuries.  Perhaps part of the reason it has a grip on us is that the old Jerusalem is such a mess – and a useful marker for all the countless other messes we human beings seem to make of things.  And yet we are not without hope for Jerusalem or for ourselves.

Jerusalem, the city that is holy to all three great monotheistic religions, is a place of division, disquiet, and discord.  It did not get this way overnight.  Centuries of warfare, hatred and distrust have contributed to this reality, and there is blame a-plenty to go around on every side.  The point is this: Jerusalem is no heaven.  It is, however, a place where God has chosen repeatedly to make himself known, even to allow his sacred Presence to rest there, where the Temple once stood, in a way that he would no where else rest.  Many of us believe that God’s Divine Presence rests there even now, mysteriously hidden behind the cracks between the stones that once provided the foundation for his holy Temple.

It has never occurred to me that someone might need to prove that God is to be found there by the Western Wall.  Either you believe it or you don’t.  Either you are on the way to believing it, or you are on the way to dismissing it.  Once you were a believer, now you are not.  Once you doubted, but now you believe.  These aspects of faith are not built on proof, and they surely do not require a near death experience of the kinds recounted in the books I mentioned.

Many of us have already come to know that life itself is a near death experience.  Life in this world is never very far from death.  It is a very recent idea – very much promoted, I suspect in places like Harvard Medical School – that life and death are any further away from other than arm’s length.  Most of our ancestors knew better than that.

For two nights of the year the church makes a special effort to re-assert this truth: that life in this world is a near-death experience.  Death comes to us all, and when it does, God has someplace to lead our souls.  I rejoice to think that an ivy league neurosurgeon is able to participate in this revelation – that has also been given to children not yet in kindergarten – that God has another life for us to live in a new Jerusalem where his Divine Presence is also to be found, perhaps more obviously than amongst the mortar and stone of the Western Wall of the old Jerusalem.  These two nights of the Christian year are meant to celebrate, on the one hand the saints whose holiness of life has been rewarded already and who rest in the nearer presence of God’s love in the heavenly regions.  And on the other hand, all the other souls, for whom we think there is work to be done before reaching their heavenly reward.  To my thinking, it is extremely helpful to think that God affords such opportunities to us, the work of his own fingers. He is creating a new Jerusalem for us to make our home; but some of us may get there faster and more easily than others!

In days gone by we used to think of these things in terms of gated communities.  Heaven, on the one hand, where Peter stood by the pearly gates.  And Purgatory, on the other hand, which was its own quite separate neighborhood, and which required a lot of upward mobility if you were ever to find your way out.  (The third option – which includes weeping and gnashing of teeth would seem to involve something more like a cage than a gate – but that’s another sermon.)

These days it seems unwise of many of us to speculate about how God has organized life in the New Jerusalem, which we are told has twelve gates, with walls built of jasper, and a river flowing through the middle of the street.  Organization has never seemed like one of God’s strong suits anyway.  Un-wiser, still to give up hope for such a city that lies beyond the grave, and beyond the end of time.

To the church’s way of thinking, these things require no proof, and are, in fact, un-provable.  So the saints themselves are proof enough – brothers and sisters in Christ who simply lived their lives in such a way as to lift our eyes to heaven and dream of a new Jerusalem.

What a shame it would be if we’d been waiting all this time for the testimony of a neurosurgeon who could attest to what we have known all along, to what the saints themselves point toward.

What a shame it would be if it had required such a brush with death to bring this news at last to the world.

Why should we have to fall into a coma in order to learn what the church long ago taught us: that God made us to be pilgrims who have someplace to go, not only in this life but in the life to come – a lesson the saints have always taught us?  We already know that life is a near-death experience.  Some of us know it better than others.  Some have had to live closer to death than others.

Why should we have to fall into a coma to dream of angels who guide us through the heavenly regions?

Dr. Alexander recounts that after a week of sickness that brought him near death, his eyes popped open, his life was restored, and he was given the gift of a vision of life bigger than he had heretofore imagined.  This story should sound familiar to nearly every Christian – for it is our story.  Some time after losing our innocence we discover that the world around us, or maybe the world inside our own minds, or maybe both, is dark and getting darker.  But our encounter with the living God awakes us from our descent into darkness and shows us a new life, a new reality – tantalizingly real, somehow apparent in this present tense, but not yet ours to claim. entirely. 

The vision of the new Jerusalem changes our lives even though we cannot yet emigrate there.  But the vision has shown us that there are enough gates for four-year-olds and neurosurgeons, and maybe even for Episcopal priests to enter in.  And although I don’t yet know the details, I give thanks for all the saints, who have lived their lives to show you and me the Way.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

All Saints’ Day 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Heaven has been much on my mind lately.  Last week we celebrated All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days – both of which invite the mind to consider heaven.  Yesterday we laid to rest a dear and holy member of this parish, whose death put me in mind of heaven.  So, thoughts of heaven have been very present to me this past week or so.

You might think that today’s Gospel reading is about heaven.  Today we hear Jesus responding to a question from a religious leader – which is the greatest commandment.  And Jesus gives an entirely uncontroversial answer.  He gives, in fact, the correct answer – for this was a question not of opinion, but of commitment to established biblical teaching.  The Jewish tradition already knew where in Torah the answer to this question was to be found – which is the greatest commandment.  It’s not even a hard question, it’s a little like asking what are the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer; even if you don’t know how it continues, you could probably come up with “Our Father.”

An interesting thing happens in this little discussion between Jesus and the un-named scribe.  Since the scribe asked the question, you’d think it would be him who evaluated Jesus’ answer.  But in the matter of just a few sentences, St. Mark makes it clear that in fact, Jesus is now judging the reaction of the scribe, and judging it quite positively, since the scribe agrees with Jesus.  And Jesus says to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

In the Gospels we often hear the terms “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven” used interchangeably.  Because of this mix of terminology, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that Jesus is talking about that misty place beyond the clouds where we tell children people go after they die.  But this is not quite right.  When Jesus said to the scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God,” he was not telling him that death was imminent.  It’s more like he was telling him, “You’re getting warmer…”

You remember how we did this when we were kids and our brother or sister was looking for something that we’d hidden.  “You’re getting colder,” we’d say as they moved away from the concealed object.  “You’re getting warmer,” we’d tell them as they moved toward the closet where it was hidden, or under the sofa, or wherever.

Jesus’ ministry was always about the kingdom of God.  So many times in his encounters with religious leaders, he’d had to say to them, “You’re getting colder.”  But here, rehearsing the greatest commandment to love God and love your neighbor, and remembering its preeminence among all the other rules of Jewish law, it delights Jesus to say to the scribe, “You’re getting warmer, warmer, warmer… you’re boiling hot now!”

These days we have forgotten so much about the kingdom of God, we confuse it with heaven – and often think of it as nothing more than a great retirement community in the sky, where the food is better than average, and the weather is better than Florida.  But when we think this way, we are only getting colder.  Jesus is not teaching about what happens to us in the life to come, he is teaching about life in this world.  He is not talking about a reward that awaits us after death, he is talking about a way of living on this side of the grave.  And when we begin to suspect that this talk about the kingdom of God has something to do with how we live our lives in the here and now, then we are getting much warmer.  Remember that John the Baptist came proclaiming the kingdom of God, and Jesus did the same.  This was the message they both began with: the kingdom of God has come near.  But what does this mean?  What are we supposed to do about it?

These days the church cannot escape the temptation to speak of our work in terms of commerce.  We talk about church shopping, marketing, and we often say that we have to be clear about what kind of religion we are selling.  I don’t much like the analogies from which that language springs, but if we must borrow our language and thinking from commerce, then I think we’d do much better to think in terms of construction than selling.  (Oh, I know they are related, but work with me here.)  For we have been called to build up the kingdom of God in this world.  This is our mission and our daily concern in the church.  How can we build up the kingdom of God?

Please note that this is not a call to establish a theocratic state, nor an insistence that America is a Christian nation, nor an assertion of so-called biblical ethics, nor a demand that the Ten Commandments be hung on the walls of our courthouses.  In all these endeavors, I fear, we’d be getting colder.

There are two phases in building up the kingdom of God, but it’s OK if they happen out of sequence.  Phase One is to worship the one, true, and living God, that is, to love him with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  Phase Two is to love your neighbor as yourself, which is to say, follow the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do for you.  When we do this, we are getting warmer.

You would not think these two phases would be hard to manage – especially since the order of them doesn’t much matter – begin with Phase Two and then move on to Phase One: it’s OK!  But the story of faith - for both Jews and Christians – has been a story of struggle to be attentive to these two phases of building up the kingdom of God.

I’m sometimes asked these days, about the state of health of the Episcopal Church – which has been rife with conflict, lawsuits, discord, and decline over the past few decades.  Will we survive?  Will the Anglican Communion, of which we are a part, also survive, since it, too, faces many struggles?

How can we answer these questions?  Who knows what will become of our institutions?  Not me.  These are tricky questions, that, I guess require tricky answers, which I sometimes feel able to take a stab at.  But there is a less tricky answer to be given in response to whether or not our church structures will survive and grow: that depends on how much we want to work to build up the kingdom of God.  Because the kingdom of God is very near you right now, and building it up is all about what we do in this life, not about what happens to us in the life to come.

It sometimes feels to us as though we ourselves or the church at large is getting colder about all this – moving further and further away from building up the kingdom of God.  And I think you know it when you feel it.  I tend to feel this way – as if we are getting colder – at committees, and meetings and councils of the church where talk is cheap and plentiful.  And I feel we are getting warmer whenever we are doing things that seem to echo with the great commandment to love God and love his neighbor.

Many of you know by know my recitation of the things we do that get us warmer:  when we are at prayer or worship, or our voices are raised in song; when we are caring for the homeless and the hungry; when we are taking old things and making them new, giving them new life; when we are feeding one another at our tables; when we are attentive to the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, and the dying.

This Parish was built to be a place that knew the kingdom of God was very near, not beckoning us beyond the grave.  It was built to be a place where people could get warmer, warmer, warmer, even boiling hot in their search for God.  And I pray that it will always be so.

Next week, I can promise you, when I stand in the pulpit, I will be talking about money – I have been reading ahead and I happen to know that the Gospel invites me to do so.  And besides, next Sunday is Commitment Sunday when we make our pledges of financial support to the Parish.  I am regularly encouraged – and there are times when I am sure that this encouragement is right – to follow the examples of professional fund raisers, since there is an entire industry of people out there who are trying to get you to give your money to various causes.  And there are times, when I think it is a good idea to take this advice, to follow the best practices of fund raising, so that we can be accountable and successful in what we do.

But more urgently, I am called to remind you of the kingdom of God, which we are asked to build up in the here and now.  This is holy work that you and I have been called to do, and we can only do it together.  It delights me to know that year after year we seem to be getting warmer and warmer as we work for the kingdom of God in this place, as we remember that it is not some distant cloudy land that we will wander through in robes of white when the last trumpet has sounded.  But the kingdom of God is near you – it is here, it is now.

Everything we do, we do for this kingdom, out of love for its king, who gave us every gift, and who lived and died for us and rose from the dead, that our lives might be shaped not by the forces of this world, but by the commandments of a greater kingdom, where we are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all souls, all our strength, and all our mind.  This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets, and on their foundations we are building the kingdom of God, by his grace!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

4 November 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

Imagine that you are surrounded by a spectacularly beautiful mountain landscape: a stream is gurgling not too far away; the sun is shining; perfect, fluffy, white clouds are floating along in the clear, blue sky; the air is crisp and clean.  All is wonderful in this sylvan scene… except that you are carrying on your back a backpack loaded with your tent, your sleeping bag, your clothes, your food and your water.  And the bag is heavy.  And you are hiking uphill.  And you have been doing this for a week, or ten days, or maybe two weeks.  This was the scene one day this past July when I was hiking in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.  I am 45 years old.  Let’s not guess just exactly how many extra pounds I am already carrying around my middle.  Let’s just say that most days the loudest sound I could hear as I hiked was my own labored breathing: in and out, in and out, as I tried to suck the oxygen out of the thin mountain air.

On my worst day of hiking – my unhappiest day, when every muscle ached, and I wanted only to sit and rest, but I was looking up to a mountain pass that I could not imagine ever reaching – a thought ran through my head as I grumbled to myself, and wondered if I could really make it.  I was aware of how long the hike was (211 miles), of how heavy my pack was (something like 30 pounds or more), and how overweight and out of shape I am (I thought we agreed not to be precise about that), and I listened to my breathing (in and out, in and out)…  and the thought that ran through my head was this:  “You did this to yourself.”  No one else had let me get so out of shape.  No one else had forced me to take this hike.  No one else had packed my bag.  I was responsible for every ounce of unhappiness I was experiencing.  I did it to myself, and there was no one to be angry or upset with other than me.

There had been another day with a moment of unhappiness, when my companions and I were hiking up a steep ridge where several trees had fallen directly across the trail, making it very difficult to ascend.  In one place there was a very large tree that had fallen across the trail at a steep angle.  I tried to climb over the tree, grabbing its branches to try to hoist my self and my backpack across its big rounded trunk.  But the tree was too big and the tangle of branches too thick to get up and over.  It looked as though hikers before me had instead chosen to duck beneath the tree, going just downhill of the path and squeezing themselves, and their backpacks between the steep mountainside and the rough tree.  There was a gap there that looked as though a small child with a bookbag might make it through.  But I could not imagine how I would get underneath with my backpack.  I was tired, and frustrated from not having made it over the tree.  I was annoyed that my smaller, lighter, and younger hiking companions had already cleared this obstacle and were now well ahead of me.  I was nervous about losing my footing.  And I was sure I would not fit underneath the tree.

So I got down on my belly, my face nearly in the dirt.  And I reached my hands out in front of me and started to pull myself forward on the sloping mountainside, underneath the fallen tree trunk.  I felt the top of my backpack hit the trunk above me, and my momentum stopped.  I scrunched myself down into the dirt to try to get lower, and I pulled myself again, and I felt my backpack reluctantly scrape along the bark of the tree as I managed to get myself most of the way under.  Another pull, and at last I made it through to the other side of the tree.  My knees were scraped, I was covered in dirt, I was breathing even harder than usual, but I was past the obstacle.  I adjusted my pack on my back and I looked up, for the trail kept going up, and I continued on my way.  I did it to myself.

I was not thinking at the time about the Gospel of Mark.  But come to think of it, very few people that I know believe in the Gospel by the time they get to the portion of the 10^th chapter we read this morning.  Very few Christians can see the value in Jesus’ teaching here, and most of us are eager to ignore it, to explain it away, or stash it in whatever drawer we stashed Jesus’ teaching that we should love our enemies: the “useless drawer” where we put other useless things.

Today’s gospel reading might as well go into the useless drawer: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”  “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  Haven’t you and I long ago consigned this passage to the useless drawer?  Only holy people – monks and nuns – believe this stuff, and they are either crazy or stupid, or there is something else wrong with them (we must assume).  For no one in his right mind does anything other than what the man in the story does: turn his or her back on Jesus and walk away from him when told to sell everything and give the money to the poor.  Except in our case we do not turn away from Jesus sorrowfully, because, really, what is he, crazy?

Remember me trying to get underneath that tree?  Do you know what never occurred to me?  Do you know what thought never crossed my mind?  This one: take the pack off your back.  You are carrying too much and it makes it hard to go forward, so take the pack off your back.

Now, normally I would think that that’s a metaphor for repentance or forgiveness or grief, or some other spiritual virtue, some inner conflict or turmoil that it’s hard to let go of.  And I would say to gently, why don’t you take the pack off your back?  Let Jesus carry it?  But I had my stuff in my backpack: the things I needed.  My life.  You don’t just take that off your back.

I played a little thought experiment the other day when reflecting about my hiking trip and this gospel reading.  I asked myself to imagine that I had been hiking with a backpack full of money, and that I could keep as much money as I could carry up those mountains.  I’d have killed myself to drag it all up there!  I’d have starved and dehydrated myself to make room for more cash in my bag.  And you could have pushed trees down in front of me and I’d have crawled under them.

And I think I actually stand pretty loosely to money.  I give a fair amount of it away.  I am not very motivated by it.  I have chosen, more or less, a life with limited earning potential.  But if you’d told me I could keep a bag stuffed with money as long as I could hike uphill with it on my back for three weeks …I’d give that serious consideration.

I’d want to know what the denominations of the bills were, of course.

I’d want twenties… at least.

When the man asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life, do you remember what Jesus did?  Saint Mark tells us that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him…”  He loved him.  This means that this un-named, unknown, never-to-be-seen-again man is in the same category as Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead!  He loved him.  This is not insignificant. 

Jesus loves you, too.  He is going to raise you from the dead.  OK, that’s later.  But now, he loves you and me, and does he also want us to hear what the un-named, unknown, never-to-be-seen-again man heard?  “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me”?

But we don’t really want to take our backpacks off, do we?

No, we do not.  We would rather scrape our way along the dirt to try to squeeze through the eye of the needle, than risk leaving our money behind.  I know I would.  And many of us would just decide that it was a better idea to turn back whence we came.  Maybe the only reason I kept going is because there were two guys ahead of me, and didn’t want to lose them.  Maybe otherwise I’d have turned around, marched to the bottom of the mountain and ordered myself a beer.

Money has a grip on us – on you and on me – and it is not letting go.  And neither are we, just yet.

And here’s the thing: it seldom occurs to any of us to take the backpack off.  It is almost unthinkable that we could do without, manage with less, or give it all away.  Let Warren Buffet do that, or Gerry Lenfest, we think.  They have plenty to spare.  But I’ll keep my backpack on, thank you very much.

Now some of you, maybe you need to be careful this way.  There are people who worship in this church week by week, I know, who really don’t have much at all in their packs, and they need to hold onto it.  But not so many of us fall into that category.  Most of us are rich by nearly any measure.  Which means that Jesus is talking to us.  Jesus loves us.  And he hardly ever had a good thing to say about the rich except this: from those to whom much is given, much will be expected – which Google may tell you is an anonymous quotation, but which is actually found in the 48^th verse of the 12^th chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke.

We forget where it came from because it has been filed in the useless drawer.  Just like the Gospel reading today: useless.

Here’s another thing we don’t believe:  Money can’t buy happiness.  Hah!  Most of us strongly suspect that money can indeed buy happiness.  And the more of it you have the happier you will be, we strongly suspect.  And it certainly seems that money buys the things that go with happiness.  But you know what money doesn’t do?  Money doesn’t make it easier to climb mountains; which is to say: to pass through the eye of the needle.

I suspect that most of us are going to leave this Gospel passage in the useless drawer for a good while longer.  I suspect that we have already turned away from it, for we have many possessions, most of us.  So we have taken the passage out for its requisite fifteen minutes and it can go back in the drawer for another year, or whatever.  But if, like me, you suspect, that Jesus actually said this for a reason, that he meant it, and that it could, in fact, be mysterious and wonderful kind of Good News that we have just not figured out yet, I have a suggestion:

Let’s practice giving our money away.

You can try when the plate is passed around the church later on in Mass.  Will you let it go by?  Or will you put something in it?  A dollar, a five, ten, twenty?  Even if you already pay your pledge by check, or credit card?  Practice giving it away.

You can practice by giving a dollar to a person on the street, whom you would normally pass by.

You can practice by taking home a pledge card and thinking about how much money you can give to Saint Mark’s, and the adding a little bit to what you think would be a reasonable amount.

Wait! you’ll say.  Jesus didn’t say to give your money to the church; he said to give it to the poor!

And I stand proudly by this parish’s record of work with and for the poor and the needy: thirty-plus years of the Food Cupboard, eight years of feeding the hungry on Saturday mornings, two years, now of St. James School – which only serves the neediest families, two free medical clinics in Honduras. 

And yes, we have lots of other bills to pay too, but I promise you that when you give, we can and do more and better ministry with the poor.

Practice giving your money away.  Practice with me, because it’s good for you, as it is for me.

Practice giving your money away because it is part growing up spiritually, and outgrowing a kind of bondage that money traps so many of us in.

Practice giving your money away, because otherwise, I promise you, you are going to get stuck, under a tree, or in the eye of the needle.  Or worse yet, you will never even start the journey, and you will go home sorrowful.

On my hike, I eventually made it up to the mountain pass that day.  And then up and over successive mountain passes day after day for three weeks, until finally we reached the top of Mount Whitney, which is the highest mountain in the continental US: 14,500 feet.  I’d call that a useful metaphor for the kingdom of God – no place higher to go!

How hard it is to get through the eye of a needle when we are not willing to let go of our money.  But I promise you, if the view from the top f Mount Whitney bears even the tiniest resemblance to the view from the kingdom of God: it is worth it!

Look up!  The kingdom of God beckons!  And nothing can stop you, except you, yourself!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

14 October 2012

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Mullen's sermon here.

For something like 50 to 100 years – it’s actually hard to say how long – various policies throughout the states of Australia resulted in the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families of origin.  There is not easy consensus about what the purposes of such policies were, and some people implausibly deny that they were ever in place.  Some say that the policies were there to protect the children from neglect; others say it was to preserve their Aboriginal heritage; still others say it was to “civilize” a race of people that was not as technologically advanced as the Europeans who had by then long ago claimed Australia as their own.

One reason for removing indigenous children from the bosoms of their families, however, seems to be wrapped up in the perverse thinking of eugenics: through generations of inter-marriage with fairer skinned people and generations of socialization in European customs, this thinking went, you could “eliminate the full-blood and permit the white admixture to half-castes and eventually the race will become white,” according to one of the policy’s best-known proponents.[i]

The children taken during these decades came to be known as the Stolen Generations – and no one really knows quite how many children were indeed stolen.  Can you imagine what it was like?  Here’s how one member of a stolen generation described what happened:

“I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie. They put us in the police [car] and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we'd gone [about ten miles] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers' backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.”[ii]  And so it was that several generations of children were taken from their own families to grow up in orphanages and schools other institutions, some of them run by the churches of Australia.  And generations of Aboriginal families were deprived of their own children.

Of course, the policies were not only misguided and cruel, they did not succeed in eliminating the indigenous peoples of the Australian continent, who have never fared very well since Europeans came to those beautiful shores with their supposedly superior culture.  To this day Aboriginal Australians often suffer the same kinds of indignities that Native Americans suffer on our own continent: unusually high rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and, of course, the loss of the lands and customs that sustained their lives for generations past.

But I digress.  For, today the Gospel compels us to think about children.  We find Jesus’ disciples engaged in an activity that adults have perfected – arguing about who is greatest, which is a way of saying that they were wrangling over power.  Knowing something about power, Jesus wants to teach them.  So he scurries off for a moment, and then comes back to the house where they are all gathered.  He has with him a child – maybe it’s an infant, or a toddler, but I like to think it’s a child a little bit older, say, a middle-school-aged child.  “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” he says to them.  And then, he takes the child in his arms.  If it’s small enough, he is cradling it in his arms.  Or, if the child is a little older, perhaps he bounces the boy or girl on his knee.  If the child is a little older still, standing beside him, Jesus wraps his arms around his or her shoulders, and draws the child close to him as he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.”

This is a recurring theme in the Gospels – not only the lesson that the first shall be last, etc, but also the instruction, the command, the imperative (you might say) to welcome children.  It’s a lesson most forcefully and memorably taught by Jesus when his disciples are yelling at people for bringing their children into the presence of the great teacher, and they are telling the people to take their kids away and get out of the way.  But Jesus intervenes and says, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”  The disciples meant well, but they were wrong – not just because Jesus made it permissible to bring children into his presence, but because children have a privileged place in his heart, and in the kingdom of God.

I sometimes think of those generations of stolen indigenous Australian children, ripped from the arms of their mothers, tossed into the backs of pick-up trucks, and then hidden away till they could somehow blend in wit the rest of white Australian society.  And sometimes I think about this parish, which I love, and about parish churches like it, and I wonder, who stole our children?

There are entire generations of children missing from the life of the church in many places, certainly it is the case here in this parish.  The children were not taken from us forcibly – it was all much more subtle.  In urban churches, like ours, it was linked to the flight of so many families from the cities to the suburbs.  And then, of course, the loss of Sundays as free, un-programmed time, protected for worship and family togetherness.  The church has proved to be a weak attraction compared to softball leagues, and football games, and Sunday brunches.  But we didn’t shoo the kids away, as the disciples did; we just woke up on successive Sunday mornings and found that they were simply missing.  We may have wondered who took them, but what could we do?

At Saint Mark’s, for decades now, we have tried to make the best of it – enormously grateful for those few families with their children who stalwartly remain – but generally learning to cope without the children, filling the roles they once filled with adults, as necessary, and keeping just enough small-sized vestments around to fit the occasional boat boy, as a reminder to us – since those boat boys and girls look so right in this place, so much like they belong here – a reminder to us of the missing generations.

There’s something awkward in the passage of Mark’s Gospel that we heard today that may contain a lesson for us.  Mark is very specific that Jesus and his disciples are gathered in a house, as Jesus talks with them, but I doubt that there is a child sitting there in the house with them.  Jesus must have gotten up to go get a child.  Did he go to another part of the house?  Or out into the street?  Who knows?  But I feel certain that Jesus had to get up from where he was sitting and go get the child that he put in the midst of his disciples in order to teach them a lesson.

Perhaps part of the lesson for us in this Gospel passage comes from asking, “Where did the child come from?”  It’s a form of the question I ask around here, “Where will the children come from?”  It’s all fine and well to say that children ought to be a part of the church, after all, but where will they come from?  Out of thin air?

Well, where did the child come from that Jesus put in the midst of his disciples?  Jesus went to find the child, and he brought her in.

My brothers and sisters, our children are missing.  They have been taken from us by forces that we often think are more powerful than we are.  And in so many cases their entire families have gone with them.

Our children are missing, and they are being deprived of a Christian heritage: of the Christian story, of the Christian sacraments, of the Christian community, of the Christian life – all of which are good and useful and holy.

Our children are missing, and after all, the church hasn’t shown herself to be an unreliable care-taker of children?  There are those who are ready to say what a good thing it is that the children are missing from the church.

Our children are missing, which puts us in peril if we truly care about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven, and whoever welcomes a child welcomes not just the child, but Jesus.

Entire generations of our children are missing from the church – including the present generation.  It’s been no one’s policy.  No bands of policemen have gathered them up and carted them off.  They are not locked up in a cell somewhere.  They have not been taken by force from their mothers’ sides.  But they have been seamlessly assimilated into a society that either thinks it has outgrown the kingdom of God, or would rather turn its back on the kingdom of God.

Our children are missing, but we cannot really point to anyone else, and say, “It’s your fault.”  Because the children were missing when Jesus gathered the disciples in that house in Capernaum, too.  The disciples, after all, were planning their own futures, designing their own vestments, arguing over who was the greatest, who would sit at the Lord’s right hand.

I wonder how they arranged themselves in that house, after their discussion – how did they jostle to get the best seat, beside the Teacher?  How awkward was it for them when he got up from their gathering and left them to sit there alone with each other?

How long was he gone?  Did he just go to the next room and find a child sitting there in its mother’s lap?  Or did he go out the front door and ask one, then another passer-by if he could borrow her child for just a moment?  Or did he bring the mother in with him too, and ask her to join them?

Why did they think he had brought a child into their august gathering?  Children can be disruptive, after all.  And they thought they were doing just fine without children; they thought it was best to keep the children at bay.  Let them come to Jesus when they are grown up, they thought.  They had no idea that the children were missing from their midst; they had thought they were doing alright without them.  But they were wrong.

So Jesus went to find a child and hold her in his arms.

My friends, if your children were missing you would go out and look for them.  You would not sleep till they had been found, you would not rest till they were warmly tucked in their beds, you would not leave any stone unturned in your search for them.

If your children were missing you would find them and bring them home.

Well, my friends, our children are missing.  To welcome them is to welcome not only Jesus, but to open our lives to the whole presence of God, to welcome the one who sent him. 

Our children are missing.  Are we just going to sit here?  Or shall we go together and find them?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

23 September 2012

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

[i] A.O. Neville in The West Australian, 1930

[ii] The Stolen Generation, by Peter Read, a report to the Dept. of Aboriginal Affairs of the Government of New South Wales