Saint Mark's Church

For the four years of my college career I lived and went to school within a few steps of Colonial Williamsburg, which is a lovely, if somewhat unusual place.  It is unusual because although it strives to be a living museum, with a very high level of authenticity, it is still not the real thing.  Everything has been rebuilt on the foundations of a colonial town.  Yes, there was a blacksmith’s forge over there, a candle-maker down the street, a tavern around the corner, but everything you see today is a re-construction, more or less a fairy tale version of the real thing.  Even the oldest college buildings, which have been in use for 315 years have been repeatedly rebuilt after fires; and the same goes for Bruton Parish Church down the street.

Another odd aspect of Williamsburg is that it is a place sort of frozen in an uncertain time, one result being that no one is in charge.  Yes there is a Governor’s mansion, with its impressive displays of colonial arms hung on its walls, but there is no governor. Yes, the House of Burgesses met down the street in the colonial capitol building, but there is no legislature to meet there now.  Yes, the church once wielded some power, but it certainly doesn’t any longer.  There is a courthouse, but no judge to mete out justice.  There are stocks in the public square, and a gaol (spelled with a “g”) but no prisoners to lock up.  There is mock musket fire, but there are no red-coats.  There is no enemy, no villain, no foe, not even a King George III across the Atlantic.

I sometimes wonder if the church has taken on some of the characteristics of Colonial Williamsburg; if, perhaps, we are re-enacting an old story on a true foundation but in a reconstructed and somewhat artificial version of it.  We use a Prayer Book that remembers older versions, but is not the original.  We wear old vestments that link us to ancient times, but of course are highly stylized.  We worship in a building that is meant to evoke the 14^th century even though it was built in the 19^th.  Are we just indulging in a fairy tale version of some ancient thing, like the new Harry Potter theme park at Disney Land?  Have we chosen to freeze ourselves in a moment of beauty that allows us to escape from the realities of a less-beautiful world?

If we go to the heart of this question, I think it has to do with that same troubling aspect of Colonial Williamsburg: is anyone actually in charge?  I do not pose this question in terms of the church hierarchy.  And unlike some Anglicans these days, I do not yearn for a centralized authority within the church that would simplify and clarify power relationships.  I mean to say that there is something about our life of faith that could leave you wondering where God is; whether he hasn’t left the scene quite some time ago; what happened to the Jesus who walked and talked and healed, but who rose to heaven long ago; where is the power of the Holy Spirit that once set the church and the world on fire with possibility, but who seems remote and perhaps unavailable to us nowadays.  Who’s in charge?

If we struggle with this sense that we might be inhabiting the Colonial Williamsburg of faith – a re-enactment built on old foundations, but not quite the real thing, it might be partly because we are sophisticated 21^st century Americans.    For instance, we read the story of the man with demons, and we already know that we are in the midst of a fairy tale, because, of course, we know that demons don’t exist.  We know that the man was probably schizophrenic.  We can diagnose him from our pews, and some of us could probably even fill his prescriptions from our own medicine cabinets.

Saint Luke tells us that the people who came out to see what had happened to the man with the demons were afraid, but there is nothing in this story that scares us, except of course for the loss of a herd of pigs, which spells financial disaster for the herdsmen at the very least (and nothing scares us these days like the loss of income-producing property).  To us this story might as well be played out by actors in period costumes in Colonial Galilee, or whatever.  It is a fairy tale being played out on a re-constructed version of some old religious stage.  And there is no real enemy, no villain, no foe, and therefore, no real trouble that there is no one in charge.

And because it is almost inevitable that we encounter the story this way, it is very hard for us to learn anything from it.  Because this story is not told in order to teach us about the dangers of demons, or to show how handy it can be to have a herd of swine around even if you keep kosher.  This story has a singular and unavoidable point, which is to teach us who is in charge. 

Jesus encounters this man who lives, we are told, not in a house but among the tombs, he is alive, but already doomed, living among the dead.  In his frequent rages he is restrained by the authorities, and chained up for the protection of others, and maybe for his own protection.  He is stark naked, a raving lunatic, and mad-possessed with many demons.  You can imagine that when he emerged from the tombs in his schizophrenic rages the townspeople believed quite strongly that there was an enemy that possessed him, a foe that needed to be vanquished, a villain who had taken his life from him.  They were not so ready to diagnose his problems away, and they had access to fewer pharmaceuticals, anyway.  And when he is around no one can control him, he cannot be restrained, no one is in charge.

Until now.

The demons know this before anyone else does.  They pull the man to the ground, and he cries out, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”  And the rest of the story unfolds so that everyone else may come to know what the demons saw first: that Jesus is in charge, that he has power to overcome demons, to cast out the enemy, vanquish the foe, deliver justice to the villain.

I do not think that this story begs us to disregard modern psycho-therapeutic ideas and the medical treatment of mental illness.  It does not insist on a suspension of disbelief that allows for the possibility of demons that are waiting to possess you and me.  We psychologized demons decades ago, anyway, but that has not really robbed them of their power; and indeed, it has made it easier for many of us to acknowledge our own “demons” without fearing that we shall be sent to live among the tombs, or locked up in chains.  But what we have not remembered so well is who is in charge.  And so in the spiritual landscape of our lives we inhabit a place where we can see the foundations of an old faith, but we suspect that no one has occupied the governor’s mansion for a long time, that no law has been passed in the House of Burgesses for decades, and that the church remains a pretty place with nice music, but not seat of power any more.

Sitting here with our own, more silent demons – our fears, our neuroses, our obsessions, our deep failings, our hatreds, our bad habits, etc.; you don’t need me to try to catalog them for you, lest I bore you with my rather mundane expectations of your more exotic demons – sitting here, being honest about those things, what we could use is a herd of swine, some unclean vermin onto which we could project all that plagues us, and offer them up and wait and see if Jesus will cast them over a cliff and into the sea, or at least drown them in the Schuylkill.  A demonstration would be nice; a sign that left no doubt as to who is in charge would be helpful.

Not far from Colonial Williamsburg, just a few miles down the road, there is an amusement park with roller coasters and games and rides and all kinds of entertainment.  I suppose it makes the idea of a vacation to Williamsburg palatable to kids who are skeptical of being subjected to the living classroom of the reconstructed colonial town, where the possibility, indeed the expectation of learning something is conspicuous.

And despite its unusual, reconstructed character, despite the gnawing reality that all this has been rebuilt, and now only represents a frozen timelessness where nothing is actually at stake today, the town of Williamsburg finds its identity primarily I think in this: that there is something to be learned there about an old enmity, about the foes that were to be vanquished, and about justice that looks to assert itself over villainy, even if it is not clear anymore who is in charge.

We are surrounded by the forces of a society that would dearly like to entertain us; knowing that nothing gets us to spend money like entertainment.  In the midst of all that entertainment, there is a story to be told of a man who was possessed of demons.  And a question, “What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”

In a world that too often makes us wonder who is really in charge, this story has been told for generation after generation, not to convince us of the existence of demons, but to help us learn the answer to that vexing question.  For each of us has our own demons.  And in each of our lives there will be enemies to fight, foes that need vanquishing, villains who need to be brought to justice – many, maybe even most of these, will be of our own making.  And we will wonder, some of us already have spent years wondering, if anyone is in charge, if there is any power in the world that can prevail, if there is any god who will come to our aid as we stand in what we have built on the ancient foundations of faith.

Who could have guessed that the question of the demons would be the question that would lead us to what we are meant to learn: What have you to do with me Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  And that the answer is so simple:  Everything, my beloved.  Everything.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

20 June 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Attempts continue, down in the Gulf of Mexico, to contain the oil spill and to stop the flow of oil from the ocean floor. Attempts are also being continued by BP to cover their corporate behinds. It is not a pretty picture, all around. Images of dead or dying birds, fish and other animals are interspersed with images of weary-looking PR wonks attempting somehow to spin the worse ecological disaster in this nation's history, a disaster brought about by corporate neglect if not malfeasance.

And the real question, as it always is in matters like this, is economic. Who will pay what, to clean up, to make restitution, to pay for what has happened?

Already swimming in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are the legal sharks who smell the blood in the water, and BP is, I am certain, already planning to mount a massive legal defense to limit as fully as possible their liability for the accident and its ecological implications.

The news stories are constant, about the effects of the spill on tourism and the local economy. The oil spill, in short, is almost entirely viewed in terms of money.

Which is generally when I admit my inherent skepticism of the ability of economic transactions or economic language to deal with the complexity of the Gulf Oil spill, the ethical problems of a corporation like BP or indeed the problems of a society that allows for the rape and pillage of the earth for economic reasons. The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a ringing indictment of the inability of our society to think or speak correctly. Our language and rhetoric is not sufficient unto the day, or the past nearly sixty days. And it is a disaster of our own making.

Which is why it is interesting that in the Hebrew Scriptures this morning we have a story that is both economic and ecological. It is a story about land and about a conspiracy to take that land from an individual. Naboth refuses to sell his land because he understands it to be his “ancestral inheritance.” He belongs somehow to this specific piece of land, that his ancestors owned and farmed, and there is not a price that can be put on it, per se. Which puts King Ahab, who desires the land, into a bit of a funk. The powerful and the wealthy for time immemorial have always wanted what they cannot obtain easily or buy, and Ahab is no different. His wife Jezebel colludes with the powerful in Naboth's city to falsely accuse him, and execute him to obtain what he will not sell. And, so Elijah the prophet is sent to Ahab with this message “Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, I will bring disaster on you.”

Which seems like a strange passage to couple in the lectionary with a Gospel passage about forgiveness. There seems to be little forgiveness in the words of the prophet Elijah. And yet, I'm interested not by the contrast of the stories, but by the fact that they both use economic terms. Because you have “sold yourself” says Elijah, and Jesus speaks about debts.

Debt is the metaphor that Jesus uses in the Gospel this morning to deal with forgiveness. The greater the debt forgiven, the larger the gratefulness. Which makes perfect sense in a common-sensical way. And I have no problem applying this to my own life: the greater someone sins against me, or more likely, the greater that I sin against them, the more gratefulness is entailed when forgiveness is given. It is when one starts to talk about systems and corporations and governments that things get a little more complicated. Is there, in fact, the possibility of forgiveness for BP or for Goldman Sachs for causing world-wide economic chaos or for economic systems that destroy people and the earth?

I wonder if that condemnation of Elijah isn't somehow prescient in our own day? It is not a far stretch for me, to read this sentence as a condemnation not just of Ahab, Jezebel and the powerful who enter into a conspiracy with them, but as a kind of condemnation which rings down throughout time: because you have sold yourself to do evil, I will bring disaster.

It would be easy, I suppose, to go the Pat Robertson route and point to the oil spill as a punishment from God, but that's not really how I roll, and I doubt you'd find it very convincing. Or it would be tempting to use that sentence to ring the changes on BP as an evil corporation. But the reality is that BP is only symptomatic, BP is only the current whipping boy, and tomorrow, or next year, or 20 years from now, there will be a new whipping boy for us to point the finger towards (and away from us) and say “You've sold yourself to evil.”

The reality is that we live in a culture, in a world where debt is the fundamental way of life. Debt, but not gratefulness or forgiveness. I was amused recently to read that Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has warned that “the federal budget appears to be on an unsustainable path,” which is, I think, a dour economist's way of saying “this is a mad house, sell and move to China.” Don't however, move to Greece or Japan, both of which face the kind of debt that as an economic layperson, I find quite unfathomable. How does an entire economic area like the European Union simply implode seemingly overnight? And we've all heard the statistics on individual debt and interest only mortgages in this country, and felt the pinch which has resulted.

Our debt is not simply the “lack of money” kind of debt, it is the debt of borrowing against the future, against the planet. BP is symptomatic not simply of the kind of economic greed which is our own, writ large into a corporation, but of a willingness to refuse to think about the costs beyond our own day, to make a quick buck despite the unsustainability of a system or process, symptomatic of a kind of alienation from creation that allows us to mortgage the future not simply of the human race, but of the whole creation, for money.

The oil spill is an indicator of how deeply sinful, we are as a society, how deep the roots of that sin reach, into the whole structure of our lives and culture, and into our language and speech and thought; and all the ways that we are complicit with BP and Goldman Sachs and all those robber barons in the rape of the earth, and in an economic system that is simply madness. The spill in the Gulf is an indicator of how desperately we need to have our overwhelming and massive debts forgiven.

The wonder of the passage from the Gospels this morning is that it doesn't matter what the woman has done. It doesn't matter how she's sinned. It doesn't matter that the culture she lives in is certainly to blame for some of that sin. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she is contrite, she is sad. She can't possibly pay her debts, which are many, and so she is forgiven without regard to the magnitude of her sins.

I asked earlier if there was forgiveness for BP, and I think that is somehow a pressing question. Not because I think BP is laboring under a heavy load of guilt, but because if BP is somehow symptomatic, then the ability of BP to obtain forgiveness is somehow about my ability to be forgiven. And this unnamed woman, who washed Jesus with tears and anointed him with ointment tells us that there is somehow, somewhere, forgiveness for us, for our complicity in our society, for our final responsibility for a world in which a corporation like BP can exist, for the inability of our language to speak or think correctly, and for our own individual and collective sins and brokenness.

But the message of that forgiveness comes with a warning. The forgiveness that Jesus gives this woman is because she is aware of her sin, and contrite. The Pharisees on the other hand are not aware of their sin, just hers. They are looking for sin in other people, not in themselves.

The oil spill is not a chance for us to point out BP and say “You are evil,” but for us to realize our sinfulness, and to weep maybe a little, and ask that our debts be forgiven, many or few, individual or communal, by the only One who is able to forgive with such munificence and graciousness, God living and true. In the name of that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Third Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.  (Deuteronomy 8:2-3)

Among the many debatable assertions made in holy Scripture, this one is a doosey: that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.  The saying comes from Deuteronomy, where it refers back to the memory of the children of Israel wandering in the desert after escaping through the Red Sea from slavery in Egypt.  You remember that they were hungry and complained to Moses, who asked God to do something about it.  In the night, while the people slept, God leaves a sprinkling of this stuff called manna - enough for everyone – which sustains them.  Of course, eventually Moses’ people will complain that all they have is this manna to eat, this food that comes down from heaven each night in the desert, what the Psalmist calls the bread of angels, but this complaining is par for the course.

The writer of Deuteronomy says that God put his people through this ordeal in the desert to test them and to humble them, “that he might make [them] know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.”  This, of course, sounds great, and is easy to recite as though we mean it.  It is a wonderful and well-worn cliché by now.  But you have to ask yourself whether or not you think it is true, and if you do, whether or not there is much evidence that you or I or anyone we know is living as though it was true.

To assess this question, it helps to get back to the desert; to think about what it means to be uprooted, uncertain, homeless, hungry, on the run, and deeply skeptical of your leader, but basically unable to do anything about it since you can’t very well go back to Egypt where you used to be a slave.  You don’t have a lot of options, and you are tired of living on manna.  Are you grateful for it anyway?  And will you remember to thank God for it after you have arrived at a land flowing with milk and honey, and perhaps steak, or at least lamb chops?

To say that we Americans live in a land flowing with milk and honey is a gross understatement.  The fact is that we live in an obscene society.  So much do we have that we fatten our children and the poor on the worst imaginable processed foods.  It is actually costly and inconvenient to eat a healthy diet in this country, or to lead what might be called a healthy lifestyle.  Warfare is so much a part of our lives, that we are basically untroubled that we have been sending soldiers to Afghanistan for almost a decade now, with no end in sight, and our idea of withdrawing from Iraq is to leave a force of only 50,000 troops there.  Who knows what we are planning to do with North Korea – and who will object?  Our disgusting dependence on oil is a helpful distraction from the reality that we have stripped the earth of so many of its resources with little care about the effect this might have on the planet or on us: trees, fish, clean water – all disappearing, just to name the most obvious.  We built a great system of schools to educate our children, but we don’t seem to care much if our children actually learn anything.  We built a great system of prisons, and we don’t seem to care if a million people rot in them, as long as we can’t see it from our house.  And we built a great economy, that after it stopped making anything useful, just found ways to make money for the sake of making money.  And then we decided that those who master that game will be rewarded the most handsomely.  Not just on the order of a few times more generously than anyone else, but with exponentially extravagant sums that allow an exponentially extravagant lifestyle.

But here is the kicker: we are not really unhappy living this way, because most of us look up with more envy than disgust at the investment banker whose annual bonus is a seven-figure number, even after the financial crisis of the past several years, while unemployment still hovers around the double digits.  There is manna and there is money, and given the choice, most of us know which we would take.  If you doubt me, ask yourself how far you would have to walk from here in any direction to buy a lottery ticket – that ludicrous tease (promoted by the government) that you, too, could live like a banker, if you just get a little lucky.  Another way to put this is to say that most of us would happily live on bread alone, as long as the bread is direct-deposited into our bank accounts.

For better or worse, in the midst of this land flowing with milk and money, (no, my computer does not even try to correct me here) there stand churches, like Saint Mark’s.  Every day of the year here, and several times on Sundays, we take some scraps of bread and a few cups of wine and we offer them to God, asking him to bless them, and to bless us, too.  Although it’s hard to picture a desert here in this beautiful church, this is meant to be a place where we connect with the memory of those wanderers all those generations ago.  It is meant to be a place where we see how God calls us out of slavery and into a new freedom.  It is meant to be a place where we rush across the parted waters of a red sea to escape the clutches of those who would exploit us, use us for their own purposes and gain.  It is meant to be a place of humility, where we come to terms with our own limitations, and God’s merciful provision.  It is meant to be a place of testing, to see if we will keep God’s commandment to love him and to love one another.  And it is meant to be a place where we are asked to consider whether or not we really want to live on bread alone.

It is so hard, as fat Americans (I can say this with confidence), to come to church and feel hungry for manna: for the food that comes only from God.  What is this wafer of tasteless bread, and this sip of too-sweet wine?  What point is there to it, what power does it have?  And who needs it anyway?  No one needs it if you are happy to live on bread alone.

But if you begin to become weary with the obscenity of our society, and begin to wonder where there is an antidote for it, you might start by looking for manna.

Once, America thought of itself as a new promised land, because of the freedom we have here, and because of the plentiful resources that could so obviously and so easily be shared by so many.  It did not take us long, as a nation, to find slaves of our own, so that we began to be more like a new Egypt: oppressing others for our own gain, and ready, willing, and able to live on bread alone.  It took a bloody civil war and another hundred years of struggle to cross that red sea. 

But remember that Moses’ followers reminisced fondly about their days of slavery in Egypt, while they wandered the desert.  They longed for cucumbers and leeks and garlic and melons, when all they had to eat was manna, from heaven.  And have we wandered back to Egypt again?  Or are we, at least longing for its cucumbers and melons, which somehow seem more enticing than our freedom and our self-respect?

If it sometimes feels this way to you, as it does to me, then you are in the right place this morning.  For day by day, and Sunday by Sunday, God propels us, when we gather in his name, back into the desert.  He leads us here to help us escape from the obscene fatness and exploitation that we would willingly enslave ourselves to in exchange for cucumbers, melons, leeks; in exchange for bread in our bank accounts.  He leads us here to show us heights of beauty, forgiveness, mercy, truth, and love unknown in the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, et al.

He leads us here to feed us with a better manna than he gave to his children so long ago  - the bread of heaven, food of angels that renews this life and fortifies us for unending life in the world to come.

There is ample evidence that man can live in this world on bread alone, but it is an obscene and ugly life we end up living that way, and it comes to an unhappy end.

There is another life to be led, in this world and in the world to come.  This is the life of pardon, mercy, wonder, joy, and love.  And there is no way to live it on a diet of bread alone, but by the love of God that comes from the mouth of the Lord.  Today, here, now, God has called again out of Egypt, he is raining down on us the bread of heaven, the food of angels.  Will we not come to his table, and eat?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 7 June 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia