Saint Mark's Church

You may listen to Mother Takacs's sermon here.

I have been to the wilderness of Judea only once. It was the spring of 2009, and I was there on a pilgrimage with a group from the Washington National Cathedral. We took a bus to get there, of course, and parked along a ridge that then led us along a wide, dusty path away from the road. Everywhere I looked was beige. Beige to the right and beige to the left – over there, along the crest of the mountain, slightly darker beige, but only very slightly, only one crayon over in the box of 96 Crayolas. The hills were so mono-chromatic that they seemed two-dimensional, flat, propped up against the horizon. It was beige and hot and dry; the sun beat down on our heads as our tour guides tried to beat it into our heads that we needed to stay hydrated. Take another sip, friends, we’ve been here 15 minutes already. Barring our sipping water and snapping photos, there was no movement anywhere – just beige and dust and heat. It was one of the least hospitable places I have ever seen – not an easy place to get to, and not an easy place to stay in.

So imagine, for a moment, that you are a Pharisee, and you have just schlepped all the way out into the wilds to have a look at this crazy man dunking people in the desert. You don’t know if he is one of the Essenes or just a nut job with an Elijah complex, but you felt compelled to check it out, if for no other reason that if anyone asks you about him you want to have a decently informed answer. You want to be able to say, “Well, when I went out to the wilderness to see him, I thought this.” That seems like what a responsible religious leader should do.

And so you’ve hauled your butt all the way out into the desert to find John the Baptist. You walked, and it was hot, and the wine skin you brought along to help you stay hydrated seemed to have gotten heavier instead of lighter as the day wore on. It wasn’t an easy journey, not least because you ended up traveling with a bunch of Sadducees who were headed in the same direction. You and the Sadducees agree about, well, not much, so along the way you tried to avoid topics that might lead to arguments, like the doctrine of sola Torah, or the primacy of the Temple, or the resurrection of the dead. Mostly you talked about John. What have you heard? Have you talked to anyone who’s been baptized? What do you think he’s up to, really? And you decided, as you traveled, that you just don’t know what to make of him, that you’ll just have to wait and see. You’ll wait, and pass judgment when you get there.

And so imagine your surprise, now that you’ve found your way down to the Jordan River, that it isn’t you doing the judging but John. You brood of vipers! he yells at you. You conniving clutch of cobras! You’ve come out here trying to look pious and responsible but you look like nothing so much as a bunch of asps. You’ve come out here to look into baptism, but you haven’t even looked into your own souls. Is there anything growing inside you or is it just dried up and beige in there? He points a dusty finger in your direction. Bear fruit, he snarls. Bear fruit worthy of repentance.

Now scripture doesn’t actually tell us what the Pharisees and Sadducees do in response to this scolding. We’re left to assume that they just up and go, leaving John to his wooly, wet work. But that doesn’t seem quite right – after all, you’re a Pharisee. You don’t mind a good argument, and you’ve walked all the way out into the desert, with the dust and the sun and the Sadducees – are you really just going to turn around and go home because this prophet has called you a couple of names? No! You’re going to challenge him right back, aren’t you? You’re going to defend yourself, say something like, wait a minute pal, bear fruit worthy of repentance, what exactly does that mean? How am I supposed to do that? I mean, I’m doing the best I can, but just in case you’ve forgotten, we Jews aren’t exactly thriving here. Remember this little problem called Rome? I can barely practice my religion at a bare bones level without getting the hairy eyeball from some Roman prefect. We’re an occupied people, imprisoned in our own cities. We’re barely making it here – we’re living in a dusty, dry, pretty beige time. Really, John, how am I supposed to bear fruit here?

And John is going to look right back at you and say, look around you, you silly serpent. Just look. Look at all of this fruit right here, in the desert. I, John the Baptist, am standing in the middle of the wilderness, and yet I am surrounded by fruit blossoming all around me, faithful, fervent followers, standing dripping in the waters of the Jordan, succulent with Grace. Look around you. You ask how you are supposed to bear fruit here, as if here is some impossible place. But there is no impossible place with God. How can you bear fruit here? How can you not bear fruit here?  

We can sometimes get stuck asking ourselves how we can possibly bear fruit in our time, in our place. And we can imagine that Advent is a time to help ourselves move along to someplace better, some holier, more mystical place where all the conditions will be right for us to be the disciples we want to be, to be able to bear good fruit. And yes, of course Advent is a time for reflection, for repentance, for re-orienting ourselves. But this Gospel reading reminds us that Advent is also a time to bear fruit – right here, and right now. The kingdom of heaven has come near to us here, in this place, even if this place feels impossible to us. Advent is a time to bear fruit right here and right now, because there is no impossible place with God. There is no place so dry, so dusty, so altogether beige, that God cannot encourage a new blossom to grow.

Three days ago, this earth lost a man who understood this truth deeply in his very spirit. For Nelson Mandela knew how to bear fruit. He bore fruit while sitting jail cell for 27 years, fruit that flourished even in a wilderness of isolation and suffering, fruit that fed a wounded people and healed a nation, fruit that produced seeds of forgiveness and mercy, of truth and reconciliation the likes of which the world had rarely – perhaps never before – seen. Mandela’s life is an Advent life, and his witness helps to remind us that Advent is a time to bear good fruit here, right here, wherever here is. Maybe we feel like the ground beneath our feet isn’t particularly fertile, that it’s been scorched by injustice and oppression, by suffering and hypocrisy, by cynicism or secularism. Maybe we feel like the ground of our heart is dried up and desolate because of fear or anxiety, grief or pain, the uncertainty in the face of transitions, the struggle of loneliness, the dark night of the soul. But I’m guessing that John the Baptist and Nelson Mandela had moments when they felt the same way. I’m guessing that Paul, and Isaiah, and Martin Luther King, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Mother Teresa and Sojourner Truth had moments when they felt the same way. And yet the fruit their bore in their lives proves to us that there is no place that is impossible for God.

Before we got back on the bus to head out of the wilderness and back into Jerusalem, I ended up standing for a few moments next to our group’s tour guide. We looked out across the desolate landscape in a companionable silence, and then he turned to me and said, “It’s just unbelievable.” I was just about to agree with him that yes, this beige barrenness was unbelievable, when he finished his sentence – “it’s so green.” It’s so – what? It’s so green, he said, and then explained that as it was at the end of the rainy season, what we were looking at was as green as the wilderness ever gets. And then he started pointing out the growth – tiny, grey-green bushes that I hadn’t noticed before, a dusty green fuzz dusting the ridges, and flowers, too, squat little squirts of yellow just three inches above the ground. There was color there, there was life there, and growth; the wilderness was bearing fruit, right where it was.

So when we find ourselves asking in a kind of futile frustration, how are we supposed to bear fruit here, we can remember that John the Baptist has the Advent answer. Because here is where we are. Here is where the kingdom of heaven draws close. Here is where Christ comes.    

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

The Second Sunday of Advent, 8 December 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Nora's sermon here.

Decades ago, in a small town in Southern California, in a very modest little house, my great-aunt Alice and my great-uncle Eddie had a dining room that betrayed their quiet ambition.  It was a very simple dining room, nothing fancy or imposing, but it had a special wall.  On that wall were three portraits, visible from where guests sat at the table.  I remember them as very large portraits, but perhaps that’s just a trick of memory.  Because these three portraits collectively made a very large statement about what was expected in that house. The first was a portrait of Pope John XXIII, who had famously presided over the Second Vatican Council.  The second was a portrait of John Kennedy, the slain Irish Catholic President. The third was a picture of Alice and Eddie’s son, John Edward. Pope John, John Kennedy, and our son John.  That little triptych expressed some serious first-generation Irish-American assimilationist parental pressure.  Pictures are powerful.  What we see when we look at the face of another says a lot about what our aspirations are.

Like many, in this week that saw the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I have been looking at pictures of the president and his wife Jackie, marveling again at their astonishing ease, their accessible glamour, their apparent comfort in a position of extraordinary power, and feeling again the strong sense of loss that is forever written into those photographs.  I know, just as I’m sure you all do, that there was no “Camelot” in Washington in the early sixties, and that deeper knowledge of both the politics and the personalities of that administration will tend to take the edge off the glamour.  It’s all the more surprising, then, to find that even after fifty years, even when so many of the uncomfortable facts are known so well, a picture of those faces, or those clothes, or that convertible in Dallas will call up such utopian longing.  Whatever else he did or didn’t do, John Kennedy was a politician who knew how to present a face to the world.  A face that made promises: about what we could accomplish, about who we could imagine ourselves to be, about what it might be possible to hope for.  One source of his power was the ability to promise more than any politician can deliver.  We require that of our leaders, and he did it exceptionally well.

When the crowd around Jesus in this morning’s Gospel looks at him upon the cross, I don’t think they see anything like promise.  I don’t think anyone knew, on that Good Friday, that they were standing at the gates of Paradise.  I don’t think they imagined us cherishing this Gospel passage as we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. More likely, the leaders and the soldiers and the criminals who were dying with Jesus saw an image of failure before them.  They saw what they were afraid of.  They didn’t see salvation in front of them because they couldn’t see in the dying Christ an image that they could identify with to make themselves feel powerful.

We can tell the people around Jesus were afraid because Luke lets us hear what they say about the dying man in front of them.  The leaders of the people are the first ones to begin the taunting: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!”  We may have grown so used to hearing these words that we no longer hear the anxiety they express.  But think about it: it’s one thing to condemn a person, or to believe that a criminal deserves the death he or she faces.  To stand in judgment like that is already a solemn, terrible thing.  It should have brought them to their knees.  But something made the religious and political leaders do more than condemn.  Something made them mock the man they wanted to see executed. 

That extra desire to be cruel to a dying man is a tell-tale sign.  Cruelty usually means one thing in us: it means that we are defending ourselves against the fear that we are like the person we despise.  So when the leaders of the people look at the dying Christ, they see the fraudulence of their own political and religious authority:  “You pretend to save, but you have no power to save.”  You could say that about their leaders, you can say that about our leaders.  Those in power in this world pretend that they can save, but they have no power to save.  They may do great good, and they may do great harm, we may give them that power, but they do not have the power of salvation we all seek.  Hear how the leaders in Jesus’s day saw in his own suffering an image of their secret weakness.

So too, the soldiers echo the taunting of the leaders:  “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”  What did they see in Jesus?  Perhaps in his failure they saw the secret weakness of their own military might: “You promise peace, but you have no power to bring order and stability to the people.”  You could say that about the Roman army, you can say that about armies now.  Whatever the bravery and selflessness of those who fight, war will not save us.  The kingship of Jesus, the God who forgives us, exposes the lie of military strength.

Even one of the criminals who is dying with Jesus joins in mocking him: “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us.”  Now, we don’t know anything about these criminals, but there is a tradition of referring to them as thieves.  I like that tradition.  Thieves have an aura of invulnerability about them. They are clever enough to go their own way, clever enough to get around the law and avoid the penalty.  They don’t have to pay for what they take. The outlaw in the wild west.  Cary Grant in that Hitchcock film, stealing jewels in the French Riviera.  Here too, the kingship of Jesus--the God who “gets around the law” by fulfilling the law in perfect love--exposes the glamorous lie of individual human ingenuity.  You could say it about the clever thief, you can say it about us: “You pretend to know how to get whatever you want, but here at the hour of death you have no power to help yourself.”

Fighters and thieves and leaders who know on some level that their power is not real.  That’s who we are at the foot of the cross, and that’s why it is so difficult for us to accept the authority of our suffering King.  There is no whiff of Camelot about this death.  And the only one we hear in the crowd who can follow Jesus is the criminal who seems to feel no need to exalt himself at Jesus’s expense.  The one we call the “good thief” is given some glimpse of the salvation before him. 

Listening to a whole chorus of people mocking Jesus, a whole chorus of authority figures and strongmen and clever scoundrels, this thief makes no attempt to raise himself above another human being.  He catches a spark from the humility of Jesus.  He simply tells the truth about himself and about them.  “Aren’t you afraid?” he asks?  “Don’t we all stand condemned?”  “Why the extra cruelty in your attack upon this innocent man?”  “What are you hiding from?”  And he asks Jesus what any lowly follower of any would-be worldly leader might ask: “Think of me when you are a king.”

Who knows what he believed about Jesus at that moment?  For all we know he spoke out of human kindness and humility, perhaps with a sense that he had nothing to lose in humoring the poor man dying beside him.  Whatever he intended, it was enough for Jesus to work with.

At that moment the gates of another world open to the good thief.  “This day,” says Jesus, “you will be with me in Paradise.”  Paradise, a word for heaven, I guess, but also familiar to us as a word for Eden. It’s a word associated with royal gardens.  It’s the world that Adam and Eve lived in before they tried to be sovereign powers in their own right.  The world we all belonged to before we tried to become like kings and gods.  A world in which we let God create us, redeem us, and save us because we know we cannot create, redeem, or save ourselves.

And in the middle of that second Eden, a new tree of life.  Jesus on the cross, speaking words of forgiveness, transforming the place of the skull into the place of the new creation.  A new heaven and a new earth.

This feast we celebrate this morning, the feast of Christ the King: it’s not something we do for Jesus because he needs us to pay homage.  This feast of the kingship of Jesus is something God does for us.  God gives us a savior who humble, who teaches us what we can be. 

There is nothing that you and I can be, or need to be, apart from fidelity to that forgiving savior.  This feast day is for us, to help us surrender our fantasies about power.  This feast day is for us, to bring us into the new world of God’s forgiveness.  This day is for us, that we may rest beneath the sheltering arms of the tree of life.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

24 November 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

You may listen to Father Phelps's sermon here.

Preached by Fr. Nicholas Phelps

10 November 2013

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Takacs's sermon here.

It’s amazing what you can get used to. An example: last week I was on my way home, walking down Broad Street, lost in my own musings and enjoying the crisp fall weather. As I crossed South Street, I looked up to see a man about halfway down the block, walking in my direction. Immediately the great question that haunts all city-dwellers popped into my mind: do I make eye contact and smile, or do I pretend like I don’t see him at all? I usually opt for the former, even if it makes me seem less cosmopolitan and chic. So as the gentleman and I approach one another, I look up, ready to smile, and suddenly he says, “Right…right. That’s exactly what I said. What in the world is she thinking?” At which point, I realized that he was, in fact, on the phone, and I laughed to myself and continued on my way.

These kinds of surprise outbursts are so common anymore that I barely even notice them. Remember the good old days, when to talk on your cell phone, you had to actually, you know, talk on your cell phone? Remember how strange it was at first to hear these one-sided conversations in public, as you sat in the train station or did your grocery shopping? But by now we’ve been through the era giant blue-blinking earpieces and the speakerphone, where people just kind of yelled in the general direction of their phone and moved on to the era of the headphones with the attached microphone. The man I saw had no visible communication device at all – no earpiece, no headphones, no phone to be seen. For all I could tell he’d had a microphone surgically implanted in his face. Nonetheless, I didn’t think a thing of it. That man who appears to be talking to himself as he walks alone down the street? Why, of course, he must be on the phone. Amazing what we can get used to.   

That man who appears to be talking to himself as he stands in the midst of the temple compound? Why, of course, he must be praying. We are, of course, completely used to the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. We have heard this story so many times that the behavior of the Pharisee hardly strikes us as odd. The fact that he stands alone in the middle of a crowd and talks out loud is no surprise to us, because we have long ago realized that he is really talking to God, trying to pray. He gets it wrong, we know this; we’re used to watching him boast about his piety, his holiness, about how much he tithes and fasts. We’re also used to the actions of his foil, the tax collector, who stands far off and cannot even lift his eyes for shame. And, of course, we’re used to Jesus’ punchline: “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other….” These two men, who appear to be talking to themselves in the courts of the temple? Why, of course, they must be praying – one of them well, and one of them not-so-well. We’re used to it.

This is, of course, dangerous. Whenever we find ourselves thinking that we “get” a parable, we should take a breath, take a step back, and sit at Jesus’ feet once more. Because we know that the parables of Jesus were intended to be shocking, to describe a world that was unlike anything his listeners were used to. Those to whom Jesus told this tale would have never seen this punchline coming in a million years. It would have seemed to them entirely outlandish, nonsensical. They would have walked away shaking their heads, wondering what color the sky was in Jesus’ world, this world where a lowlife like a tax collector, a corrupt, abusive, puppet of Rome, is held up as a model over and above a Pharisee, a faithful, righteous, strict keeper of the law.

And why is it so dangerous for us to think that we know better? After all, we have the gift of hindsight; we see the whole story, and we know how it ends. We see the color of the sky in Jesus’ world because we’re trying to live in that world, too. We know a bit better, don’t we? Ah, dangerous thinking. The risk here is two-fold: first, that we might get so used to this story, so comfortable with the caricature of Pharisee as fool and tax collector as diamond in the rough, that we will fall headlong into the parable’s trap by saying something like, “God, I thank you that I am not like this Pharisee.” Dangerous.

But the second risk here, if we are too quick to get used to this parable, is that we might miss the fact this Pharisee is not, actually, like the man I saw walking down Broad Street. That man looked like he was talking to himself but was actually talking to someone else. The Pharisee in this story looks like he’s talking to God but is actually talking to himself. He doesn’t speak as if God is actually listening; he’s just thinking out loud, talking to himself about what he’s done, and how he feels about it. God doesn’t have much to do with it. Even the text itself is unclear here. The Greek phrase which describes his prayer translates to something like, “he prayed thus to himself.” Does this mean he prayed under his breath so that no one else could year? Or does it literally mean that he was praying to himself? Or, perhaps, does the ambiguity simply lie there, challenging us to think differently, about him and about ourselves?  

There are times in all of our lives when we find ourselves praying thus to us? It’s an easy trap to fall into. It’s easy to get so used to our prayers that we are blinded to the fact that they actually do ascend to heaven like incense. We pray without actually praying, start a conversation with the expectation that no one is really listening. An example: we confess our sins often in this place – every Sunday, every day, in fact. We offer a weekly opportunity for private confession. But do we say those words as if God is actually listening? When we say, “Most merciful Father,” do we feel, in the speaking of those words, that we are demanding the attention of Almighty God? When we pray, “we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed,” are we just talking to ourselves, going over a list in our own heads and for our own sakes, waiting for the priest to turn around with words of absolution, waiting to get up off our knees? Are we talking to God, or to ourselves?

This parable reminds us that whether we recognize it or not, God is listening. God is always listening. God does hear us talking. This confession that we make week after week, day after day, can never be an empty gesture, because it’s real. It’s efficacious. It matters. We have really sinned, you and I have sinned, the Church has sinned, the country has sinned, our forebears have sinned. And God knows it, knows all of our sins already, even those that we are too afraid to bring to mind. God listens. If we were able to really grasp this, if we were to feel the sharp reality of this conversation, to acknowledge God’s Almighty, Omnipotent presence, our regular confessions would feel far different. We might even find ourselves beating our breasts, kneeling with heads bowed low, foreheads on the ground, unable to speak at all. We might find ourselves echoing the words of God’s people in Jeremiah, praying that God will not completely reject us, hoping that God does not loathe us, longing for peace and healing, hoping against all hope that God will continue to be righteous, that God will continue to forgive.

But this is not meant to scare us. Because the truth is that if we let ourselves become so used to speech of our confession that we are only really giving it lip service, we miss out. We miss out on the opportunity to feel the transformational grace of God’s mercy, the unearned and unmerited gift that God gives us when he says to us again and again, yes, I hear you, yes, you are mine, and yes, I forgive you, I cherish you, I see you and seek you out, and yes, through the merits of my only son, your beloved Savior, Jesus Christ, I even exalt you.       

So go ahead. Make your humble confession before Almighty God, devoutly kneeling. Pray as if he is listening, talk not to yourself but to him, and know his infinite mercy and love. Speak, you humble, beautiful sinners, speak you servants, for your God is listening.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

27 October 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

You may listen to Mother Takacs's sermon here.

As many of you know, this past week, Saint Mark’s hosted the fifth national conference of the Society of Catholic Priests.  We had a really wonderful week together, with powerful liturgies, beautiful singing, inspiring presentations, and a truly transformational afternoon spent at the Saint James School. I am so grateful to all of you who helped Saint Mark's be so wonderfully hospitable to all of our conference guests and society members who came to Philadelphia from all over the country.

One of the joys of hosting a conference like this, of course, is getting to show off the city in which you live. Many of our guests were coming to Philadelphia for the first time, and it was great fun for me to watch them explore this city that I love so much. Our conference agenda was quite full, so I didn’t make so many recommendations about what to do as I did about where to eat – introducing guests to the wonders of Steven Starr; assuring them that yes, I’m not kidding, that vegan restaurant is supposed to be really, really good; trying to convince them that the gelato at capogiro is truly legit; and, of course, naming all of the places within a four block radius that know how to pour a good pint. I enjoyed listening to the conferees report back the next morning on where they’d gone – and on what they’d experienced when they got there.

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that I had at least half a dozen priest colleagues tell me with great wonder and awe of their experience that showing up in a bar in Philadelphia in a collar will get you a free round. And these colleagues of mine just couldn’t believe it. Now remember, many of these priests live in rural areas, or in the south, where the sight of a priest might raise an eyebrow but probably not a pint glass. But Philly, as you know, is still a pretty intensely Roman Catholic city, and when a gaggle of priests walks into a bar, and there isn’t an obvious joke to follow, well, some of our hospitable neighbors reach into their wallets and tell the barkeep to buy the nice fathers (and maybe the lone and slightly confusing mother) a whiskey chaser on them. My colleagues were blown away by this and many of them have, I’m sure, gone home to update their profile pages on the church deployment website in the hopes of working here permanently.

Now as someone who lives here, I can say that this does not actually happen regularly. At least not to me. It probably does to Father Mullen. And I’m sure that part of the reason for the free rounds was that there were so many of us. Four full tables of priests in the Irish pub; a baker’s dozen of collars at a karaoke bar (I was not there for that, just FYI) – and, on Friday night, ten priestly types around a common table at The Farmer’s Cabinet. That much black clerical wear tends to attract a bit of attention.

So on Friday night, at The Farmer’s Cabinet, we decided that since everyone was already looking at us anyway, we would go whole hog, and when our food came out, we stood up around our table and sang the doxology. Now I have to admit, I feel a little sheepish telling you that. I’m a little nervous admitting to you that I stood up in a restaurant in Philadelphia on a Friday night and sang praises to God in a loud and lusty voice. And there are a thousand little voices in my head whispering all of the reasons why: because it isn’t very elegant, because we Episcopalians just don’t do that, because it was show-offy, because it inconvenienced other diners, because Jesus said to go into your closet to pray, because it was rude or pushy or gauche. And maybe there is some truth there, I don’t know. But I can say that in the moment, I didn’t feel any of those things. I just felt incredibly grateful. Grateful for the friends around the table, grateful for the week we had just shared, grateful that that week was over, grateful for the fact that I get to serve a parish as generous and beautiful as Saint Mark’s with musicians as generous and beautiful as ours, grateful that I get to work with a priest as fine as Father Mullen, so grateful that another fine priest, Mother Johnson, had offered to take the Mass for me yesterday so I could recuperate a bit – I was so grateful, filled with joy, and happy to sing out my praises to God. It felt good, it felt right, it felt necessary.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Jesus seems to expect this behavior from the lepers he has healed. “Were not ten made clean?” he asks. “But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Only one has returned, a Samaritan, who has not only come back to thank Jesus for this miracle but praised God “with a loud voice.” Now it’s easy for us with our twenty-first century eyes to imagine that this kind of thing happening all of the time in first century Palestine. People must have been running around praising God with a loud voice all of the time – common occurrence, the running and the leaping and the prostrating yourself before an itinerant preacher. Common occurrence, more acceptable in those times…except that it obviously wasn’t. Because only one of the lepers returned, only one of them came tearing back down the street towards Jesus making a complete spectacle of himself by shouting out his praises and thanks to God right in the middle of the village square. Only one of them was filled up enough with the Holy Spirit to just not care if he was being inelegant or rude, if he was inconveniencing people with his songs of praise, if he was fitting in with commonly accepted village etiquette. Only one of them felt good enough to be loud about it.

And Jesus seems okay with this. He doesn’t shush him (which, after all, Jesus has been known to do from time to time); he doesn’t say, oh, yes, that’s very nice, thanks, but would you mind taking that exuberance over to the synagogue, there are people here who don’t want to hear that kind of thing. No – Jesus says that his faith, that enthusiastic, raucous faith has made him well. His loud voice of praise isn’t just okay; it’s actually an active and living force, a force for healing, a force for good, a force for the kingdom.

Now I’m not saying that we should all go running out into the street praising God with a loud voice. Although maybe that is what I should be saying, honestly. And the point isn’t really to just be braver about saying grace, although that isn’t such a bad idea either. The point is to find ways to be that grateful, to dig for the taproot of our gratitude and to let it well up within us, to look at our lives and to be so filled up full with thanks that we cannot help but sing out in a loud voice – for the food we eat, for the jobs we have, for the city we live in, for the people we love, for the bodies we are, for the God we worship. If we take the time to notice all that we have, to stop and breathe and actually look at the grace that really does flow through all of our lives, running around praising God with a loud voice won’t feel so ridiculous. It will feel good; it will feel right; it will feel necessary.

This is what we’re doing during this stewardship season. Our vestry and other leadership of this parish are coming to you, to each of you, to spend some time tapping into that root of gratitude. What do you love about your life, about this church? What do you love about the holy work of God in this world? I am convinced that when we do that, when we stop and notice and talk about the many gifts in our lives, the praising God with a loud voice just comes. It will look like the number of your pledge, written boldly on a card and offered to God on Commitment Sunday. It will look like using words like “grateful” and “blessed” and “grace” in our regular, ordinary, everyday lives. It will look like smiling at strangers, like reaching out in love, maybe even like singing.  

I’ll bet you’re wondering what the response was to our impromptu hymn fest at The Farmer’s Cabinet. Not much. We got a smattering of applause, which was interesting. Later in the evening a woman from the table next to us came over and asked us if we would sing Happy Birthday to her husband Bob, obviously confusing us with that next hot singing group The Ten Episcopal Priests. I left early, I must admit, so I’m not sure if there was more of a response later on in the night. Maybe not. Maybe we were just an oddity, these people dressed in black and singing a strange old chorale in the middle of cheese plates and cocktails. But maybe, just maybe, there was a young woman in the back corner of the restaurant singing with us under her breath. Maybe, just maybe, there was a college student who remembered that hymn from his old church and felt a swell of gratitude for his old youth group from those days. Maybe as we sang about blessings that flow, there was an old man who offered a silent prayer of thanksgiving to God for his recent recovery from surgery, and a mother who thanked God that her daughter-in-law is finally pregnant, or a couple who felt a surge of gratitude just because they were together. Maybe, right? So go, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

13 October 2013

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia