Saint Mark's Church

Some time in the mid 1760s a Christian missionary named Samuel Kirkland began to live and preach among the Oneida tribe of Native Americans in upstate New York.  By many accounts Kirkland became close friends with the Oneida chief, Skenandoah.  It was, in part, this friendship that eventually convinced the Oneida to side with the colonist rebels in the Revolutionary War, and Skenandoah was said to have become a friend of George Washington’s, among others.  After the war, however, the Oneida were displaced from their land, and ultimately granted 6 million acres, effectively creating the first Indian reservation.  Legend attributes an epitaph to Skenandoah who is said to have lived to be over 100: “I am an aged hemlock; the winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches.  I am dead at the top.  The generation to which I belonged have run away and left me.”

Some of you know that after he sold his share of the restaurant and the catering business Bruce turned his hand to writing a libretto for an opera.  The libretto, I discovered from Bruce’s brother David, dealt with Skenandoah and the Oneida people.  I know that Bruce brought his laptop to the hospital and had books there that he was using to research the Oneida as he worked away at the story.

I am not surprised that Bruce was attracted to the story of a people who would ultimately be displaced from their homes; as many of you know, Bruce had a deeply held and abiding concern for refugees.  And I am not surprised that he would be attracted to the story of a Christian missionary who managed to befriend rather than alienate a noble indigenous people.  Bruce knew, of course, that this was not always the case; that the church was not always to be found on the compassionate side of complicated relationships.  He would have been glad to celebrate the friendship between Kirkland and Skenandoah, I think.  And I can’t say for certain which of the two he would have personally identified with more readily, though I suspect it would be Skenandoah.  And I suspect it would have made an absolutely wonderful libretto!

Bruce was a little disappointed in me because of my failure to appreciate opera.  Not long ago he suggested that I at least try attending an HD simulcast from the Met – a suggestion I successfully resisted.  But I realize that Bruce’s love of opera was just one aspect of his larger appreciation of beauty.  He once led a giving campaign here at Saint Mark’s in which he urged us to adopt Mother Teresa’s slogan that we do something beautiful for God.

Bruce loved beauty; he saw God wherever he found beauty, I think, and he believed, I know, that it was both a duty and a delight to offer beauty back to God.  You could see this in so many aspects of his life: he thought you could take what was given to you and make something beautiful: this business, those ingredients, these words, that pile of hops and malt and barley.  You are going to make something out of it; why not make something beautiful.

He tried to make a beautiful marriage with a beautiful woman, but when that didn’t work, he and Beatrice eventually found a way to make a really quite beautiful reconciliation.  In fact, the first time I ever met Beatrice was on a Christmas Eve at midnight mass when I met Bruce at the door with both Beatrice and Jim – all three of them smiling!

Unlike Skenandoah, Bruce did not even get close to a hundred winters in this life.  When he was diagnosed with Leukemia, he said to me that perhaps we should talk about a memorial service.  His chemo had not yet even begun, and I assured him that we would have time in the weeks and months ahead to talk about that, never dreaming how wrong I’d be.

In the hospital Bruce often had friends and family visiting.  His brother David, was as vigilant, loyal, and devoted a brother as any man could want.  Beatrice was often there, massaging Bruce’s feet.  I did not often have time alone with Bruce.

But on one occasion when we were alone he told me about something that had happened the night before.  He’d been awakened by screams from a woman in a room several doors away from his: tortured, anguished screams, he said, that you knew came from someone in agony.  Nurses came to her aid, and maybe doctors, he didn’t know, but he was aware that efforts were being made to help, to give this woman relief, but still she screamed.  Of course there was nothing Bruce could do: he could neither shut the screams out of his ears nor help to bring relief to the woman in pain.  But he suddenly had a thought, he told me, that he should pray for the woman, and so he did.  And when he began to pray, the woman’s screams subsided, and eventually fell silent.

One more time that night, the episode repeated itself: Bruce was awakened by the screams, the medical staff did their work to no avail, and Bruce then offered his prayers for the woman, whose screaming stopped.

As I listened to this somehow beautiful account of a night full of pain, I knew that Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it – since he is not prone to a superstitious take on religion.  I suggested to him that maybe the gift of his prayers was not entirely intended for the woman’s benefit, maybe the real gift was in the assurance to him that his prayers were heard, and attended to in ways he could never foresee or imagine.

If this is true of Bruce’s prayers, as I am sure that it is, then it is also true of yours and mine.  God hears our prayers.  We think we are praying for one thing, but God knows what is needed, and what will happen, and sometimes he answers our prayers in ways that we cannot foresee and cannot even imagine.  God hears our prayers of grief at the loss of Bruce.  He hears our prayers of worry at what becomes of him, of all of us, after death.  God holds us all in the palm of his hand.  He will not let us become refugees in death; he does not drive us from this life to languish in nothingness or darkness or worse; he does not confine us to the bleak reservation of the grave.

God hears our prayers, and he has answers we cannot imagine in the many mansions of his house.  And if he hears our prayers, if he hears Bruce’s prayers, we can be certain of at least one thing: in one of those rooms there is good beer being served.

Let us now offer our prayers for Bruce, as we commend him to God’s care.

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Requiem for J. Bruce Nichols, Jr.

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

29 January 2011

In the forty years between 1860 and 1900 attendance here at Saint Mark’s increased more than five-fold, out-pacing by a significant measure the rate of growth of either the Episcopal Church in general, or the population of Philadelphia.  One wonders if the clergy of this parish stood on the street corners and pulled people inside!  But of course, this was an even more fashionable neighborhood then than it is now, and this is Philadelphia, and we have always been an Episcopal church – these are not the ingredients that make for clergy standing outside yelling to bring people in!  I, myself, do something like that only once a year: on Christmas Eve, which is the one night a year that I can safely bet that most people walking by late at night on Locust Street are heading to church!  And even on that holy night, I do not borrow my script from John the Baptist and announce to those I encounter: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  I want to bring them, after all, not scare them away!

It’s very hard for us to believe that John’s message somehow had good effect, because we can’t imagine that it would work on us.  Why is he talking about the Lamb of God?  And if Jesus is so terrific, why doesn’t John drop what he is doing and follow Jesus himself, rather than staying on his street corner to take up his rant day after day?

In the Gospel this morning we are told that this is how Jesus’ disciples first began to follow him: they heard from John the Baptist, that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, then, without even talking with Jesus, they start walking behind him, following where he leads, until eventually Jesus stops, turns around, and asks them that basic question: “What are you looking for?”

I wonder how closely that pattern matches the paths any of us took to get to faith in Jesus.  At first glance, there may seem to be little resemblance here to your spiritual journey or mine – but maybe that’s mostly because the costumes are so different.  When I think about it, I realize that I had been hearing about Jesus my whole life (even singing every Sunday that he is the Lamb of God) before I realized that I was basically just walking behind him without ever really having talked with him (spiritually speaking).  Eventually my life reached a point that I began to ask myself basic questions about what I was doing, who I was, and those questions could have been summed up by asking, What are you looking for?

I was, at the time, a young staff member for a US Senator.  Most of my peers were dreaming and planning for law school or business school and the rewards and challenges that follow, or they were plotting a shift to some other way to make lots of money.  I suppose they may have been responding to the same questions; I don’t really know.  Of course, you can go to church your whole life and still avoid such questions.  You can go to church your whole life and never know what you are looking for, too.

If you read the text of John’s Gospel closely, you might suspect that there is evidence that the first disciples were Episcopalians.  Here’s why: after walking behind Jesus and being confronted at last by his probing question, “What are you looking for?” the disciples respond by asking Jesus this: “What hotel are you staying in?”  Not only do they artfully duck the question of what they are looking for, they avoid asking the much more interesting question that could have serious implications for them, “Where are you going?”  Yes, they could easily have been Episcopalians: much more interested in where they could park themselves than in where their faith might take them!

But the question does find its way to us after all these centuries, What are you looking for?  And what remains to be seen is whether or not we have grown up enough to engage this question with Jesus, whether or not we want to try to tell Jesus honestly and openly what we are looking for.  Or do we still prefer to deflect the question and ask him where he is staying?  To be fair to those first disciples, the Passover was approaching and they may have intended their inquiry to discover where Jesus would spend the holy days, so they could be with him.  But let’s assume, for our own purposes, that the disciples deflect the question because they don’t know the answer, don’t know what they are looking for.

Do you know what you are looking for?

Studies tell us that religious convictions in America are strong, that the vast majority of our neighbors consider themselves not only spiritual but religious.  But studies also tell us that the vast majority of younger people do not know the religious traditions of their own families, cannot rehearse the basic stories of faith, don’t even know the cast of characters.  How could they know what they are looking for?  And what would they make of the news that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?  How could that possibly mean anything?

As it happens, in Jesus’ day, the ancient Jewish ritual of slaughtering a lamb for the Passover and taking some of the blood to smear it on the doorposts of the house had been lost to the average Jewish household, and was now practiced, on their behalf, by the priests, who, I suppose, also enjoyed the best cuts of the lamb when it was roasted with oil and herbs.  (Priests, it has to be said, have a long history of keeping the best stuff for themselves.)  So the men who gathered to hear to the forceful preaching of John the Baptist knew that if Passover was coming visitors would need a place to stay.  This much they knew – but they did not know, they had forgotten that a lamb was needed.  It was no longer their job to remember about such things.

Urged on by something in the words of John the Baptist that they did not understand, but felt, the best those men could do was to fall in step behind this strange rabbi and quietly follow him, maybe just to see where he would go.  How arresting it must have been when Jesus spins around on his heel and looks them in the eye and asks them, I think with a smile on his face, “What are you looking for?”

Despite a strong religious feeling in our country, many religious institutions – many churches – are emptier and emptier each year.  I don’t know if this congregation has shrink five-fold in the last 110 years, but I know we are smaller than we once were.

Are there fewer people who are ready and willing to be confronted by the question: What are you looking for?  It would seem not.  But we may have forgotten about the need for a lamb – and maybe this is in part because priests have been too willing to do it ourselves, to think that it isn’t so important that you remember the need for a lamb.

The world has plenty of cruelty, wickedness, and sin.  At the moment we are keenly aware of this because of the shootings in Tucson last week.  But we know that there is much to be delivered from closer to home, as well, even within our own hearts.

I pray that it will be part of the ministry of the priests of this parish to teach anyone with ears to hear about the need for a lamb, and never to keep the best parts for ourselves.

I pray that we will all remember that John the Baptist never gave up his ministry of proclaiming Jesus until he was thrown in prison and killed.  And that we will be bold enough to take the good news out into the streets when we are able, and declare it to the people.

I pray that we will remember ourselves and show others that it is enough to follow behind Jesus quietly for a while, maybe without much talking to him or knowing why you are there.

And I pray that this will always be a place where people find that in their pews during a prayer, or even a sermon, or while serving at the altar, or ladling out soup, or tutoring at Saint James the Less, or visiting a friend who is sick, or greeting someone at the door, or sharing a favorite dish at a pot-luck supper, or singing with the choir, or a hundred other ways we discover Jesus turning on his heel to ask us, “What are you looking for?”

And rather than deflecting the question, I pray that every one of us, and many more who we do not yet know, will learn the answer that the disciples might also have learned from the Psalmist, and say to Jesus when he calls us, “Behold, I come.”

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

15 January 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Since about mid-August Leo, my cat, has been hiding behind the sofa in the Parlour on the second floor of the Rectory.  This is the fourth time he has found himself a hiding place since he was brought to me from the streets as a kitten – about one every year of his life.  He has lived under a window seat, behind a different sofa on the third floor, under my bed, briefly in a closet, and now behind the sofa in the Parlour.  Leo’s life is ruled by fear, given real shape in the form of my two Labrador Retrievers, Baxter and Ozzie, whose enthusiasm to befriend the cat and play with him, Leo mistakes for threats to his person.  To borrow the image from the Gospel story this morning of the flight of the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus) out of Bethlehem, Leo is in Egypt.  His most recent flight came in the aftermath of a visit from my two five-year old nephews, who shared a room with Leo.  Their exuberant presence drove him into the closet for four days, but eventually he sought sanctuary on a different story of the house.  It took me several days to locate him in his new Egypt, and then to move his food and water and litter box, so that he could establish himself in that new land.

I would like to think that angels speak to Leo in his dreams, and that his movements are the result, as they were for Joseph, of his confidence in God.  But if that were so, Leo might take flight with the conviction that God cares for him, and has a plan in mind for the universe and even for every kitten under heaven.  But I am certain that Leo has no faith in what we used to call God’s Providence – the certainty that somehow, mysteriously, God is guiding all things by his divine, gracious, and merciful will.  But Leo has no trust in God, no confidence in God, no faith in God.  Leo flees from one Egypt to the next and never gets to Nazareth to grow up and let God’s plan unfold – in which he would learn to be brave enough to spar with Labradors, and in his spare time, sit in my lap or bask in the sunshine on the window sill.

If, on one of his flights to one of his Egypts, Leo were to stop at a resort on the Dead Sea he might learn a funny irony: the Dead Sea is so called because it is so salty nothing can live in it,  but it is also so buoyant as a result of its high salt content that it is almost impossible to drown in it.  Dive in and you will feel yourself pushed up, almost as if by a strong set of arms that will not let you sink.  It is a remarkable feeling, I can tell you.  Or at least, Leo might, on one of his journeys to Egypt, have allowed himself a dip in the Mediterranean, and reminded himself that if you just lie back and relax in the water you will float, but if you are tense and thrash about, you will struggle to stay above water.  But when Leo gazes across the sea to Egypt he never believes he can float – he is sure he will drown.  So he always travels by land, and always at night.

So much for Leo, poor thing.  But the story of the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt is not told as an exercise in kitten welfare, it is told for you and for me, who have been known to flee in fear to our own Egypts.  Angels are not often instructing most of us in our dreams, so it remains a question of faith and confidence and conviction about God’s love and care how we respond when we find ourselves fleeing in fear.  Can you at least identify with Leo a little bit?  Do you know what it feels like to want to hide behind the sofa?  I do.

If the angels are not sent to give us instructions, though, it remains to be seen whether we will model our lives on Leo’s and stay there behind the sofa, until the next threat comes along and we go in search of a new Egypt.  How tiresome this life must be, moving from one exile to another, and never finding the way to Nazareth where we can finally grow up!  Joseph had his angels to bolster the faith that was given to him in his dreams.  It’s not that he was without fear; it’s not that the way was easy, or that the outcome was guaranteed, or that there would be no challenge, no sadness, no losses on the way.  It’s just that Joseph trusted that God was leading him and his little family in the way they had to go, and so he would not let himself be paralyzed by fear, even though there was ample cause to be frightened.

If angels are not sent to you and to me, then we can at least rely on Joseph’s angels, since we have been given the story.  There will always be times in our lives that fear comes creeping or storming into the room.  Now what?  You can take flight, like Leo, and only ever make it from one Egypt to the next.  But will you ever get to Nazareth?  Will you or the child Jesus you have in your care ever grow up?  Another way of asking this is to ask, do you believe that God is guiding you and the whole universe by his divine hand – no matter how remotely?  Do you believe there is a reason to get to Nazareth, that there is something to grow up into?

So many people these days have given up on the idea that God has a desire for the universe, a direction for our lives, a meaning to bestow on us, and a hope the points beyond our fears.  And I understand why it has become harder in the world today to place our trust in God, to see the promise of his providential will.  But I also see that the alternative to trusting in God, is to flee from one Egypt to the next, and maybe never to make it to Nazareth.

But if we follow Joseph and his little family, it may be that we could find a place to live on the same street, and learn to play with the boy next door, who has had such a harrowing and frightening childhood (even after that amazing encounter with sages from the east!), and we would learn from an early age to call Jesus our friend, which is what he calls us, as he teaches us to trust in the divine providence of his Father so that, “with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know what is the hope to which he has called us, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe!”

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 January 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Once there were Christmases

with electric mornings,

as though all the lights on the tree

were plugged in to me,

and their low voltage woke me up

earlier than I would usually wake,

earlier than anyone needed to wake.

 

You remember those Christmas mornings, too.

They were childish and wonderful.

We had all been up too late –

to sing at the first thought

that Christmas was here

at the Midnight Mass.

 

And now we were awake again –

the children, anyway –

electrified with the promise

of bulging stockings

and wrapped-up possibilities

beneath the tree

that seemed to belong there,

in the living room.

 

Is it time or distance,

age or something else,

that dims the tingle

of those electric,

holy mornings?

 

Have we grown up

only to believe

that the electricity of them

was truly generated by the stockings,

by the gifts wrapped in paper,

lying under the tree,

or the tiny stringed lights

that have only enough power to twinkle,

not to shine, and surely not enough

to wake a boy from his sleep?

 

Is this the wisdom we have grown up to learn

in the same way we learned

not to worry about Santa,

not to think him real,

not to believe in silly things?

 

Speaking for me, and for you, I can say

that time and distance have all grown longer,

age and everything else have all advanced.

Even the dimmest tingle –

a shiver up the spine,

pinpricks in your toes or fingers,

what hair you have left

alert on the back of you neck –

would be a welcome sign

of the kind of life

that seemed to lie before us

in our childhood.

 

What was the solemn age at which

the un-plugging of the Christmas tree

un-plugged something else,

some possibility

inside of us,

access to some other light

that once we believed

shined in the darkness,

though the darkness comprehended it not.

 

Talk about darkness!

We have evolved

to see in the darkness,

because it surrounds us

day and night.

 

Do you need me to write up a catalogue

of the shades of darkness we live in?

War, greed, hatred, poverty, fear,

each with its own drop-down menu of options,

its own interactive map of dreadful reality.

 

It is the same catalogue

that humanity has published age after age:

the bright pages in there, too,

but so easily turned over,

flipped past,

stuck together;

so easily smudged by the blacker ink

of the cruel pages

we are not willing to stop publishing.

 

And it sometimes feels as though

we have made a quilt

of all the old catalogues of darkness,

and pulled it up over our heads,

as though this was a good idea,

as if this heat from things burning

could keep us warm,

and would not destroy us.

 

But there is a Christmas light

that has no electric cord,

no lithium ion battery,

no candle wick.

And though it arrives

in the person of a child,

it is not childish.

 

There is this light that lightens all people:

this light that shines in the darkness.

There is this light, generated by the Word

that was spoken once into darkness long ago.

And in this darkest time of a darkened year

when we remember that the Word was made flesh,

and we try to imagine what that means,

can we be still enough

and silent enough,

can we close our eyes tight enough,

can we reach out with everything we have –

even those tiny hairs on the backs of our necks –

to see if we can feel the pulse

of that magnificent alternating current,

as if made by the beat of angels’ wings,

that could surge through our bodies,

and into our hearts,

and deep in our minds,

and behind the fading retinas of our eyes;

as we receive the only true gift of Christmas?

Is there another electric morning or two

to be had by each of us?

 

You thought that you were born of blood;

you thought you were born of the will of the flesh;

you thought you were born of the will of man;

and this would account for the darkness,

would it not?

 

But you were not born of blood;

nor of the will of the flesh;

nor of the will of man,

but of God.

 

And he has given you power

to become his own child.

You may call him “Abba!  Father!”

since you are no longer a slave to the dark,

but a child of the light;

and if a child, then an heir

to the throne of light

which lightens the whole world.

 

This is an electric morning!

Lightning struck last night,

and the ground still tingles.

Spread out your toes,

press your soles hard to the floor

and feel the residual power,

(you can feel it even through your shoes)

still buzzing through

whatever will conduct it.

 

This is an electric morning because

the Word was made flesh

in the beautiful simplicity of childhood,

the kind of childhood

that made it easier for us

to be electrified:

walking Christmas trees

of hope and promise.

 

This is an electric morning,

and you, who once thought

that only on your best days

could you even hope to twinkle,

(and who can see that your best days

are behind you)…

 

… you find that on a morning such as this -

an electric Christmas –

you can do better than twinkle,

now that the light is here,

this electric morning,

you can shine!

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 December 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Ninety nine years ago – almost to the day (it was actually the 30^th of December, 1911) the great new building that was erected to house John Wanamaker’s department store was dedicated, after seven years of construction.  The building was designed by the famous Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, and was dedicated by President William Howard Taft, who must have been pleased that Wanamaker’s was the first department store in the country to house a restaurant.  That building still stands a few blocks from here, and, although the name of John Wanamaker has been removed from the store for years now, as it has changed hands several times, it still plays host to a light show that continues to be very much a part of Christmas in Philadelphia.  If it’s dazzle you want, you take your kids to the Comcast Center, but if it’s tradition you are after, you go to Macy’s, (and you pretend you are still at Wanamaker’s).

John Wanamaker, the founder and builder of that store was one of the richest and most powerful men in Philadelphia and in the nation.  His son, Rodman, took over the company and is credited for continuing the kind of revolutionizing business practices that his father had been famous for (Wanamaker’s was the first store to give a money-back guarantee if you were unsatisfied with your purchases), and for arranging for the installation of the enormous pipe organ in the Grand Court.  But Rodman, who had a kidney disease, lived only six years longer than his father.

By the time Rodman died in 1928, he had long since buried his wife Fernanda here at Saint Mark’s beneath the altar in the exquisite Lady Chapel he built for that purpose when she died at the turn of the century.  If you have never been here before, I suggest you peek in after mass or on the way back from communion to have a look at the work of beauty for which Mr. Wanamaker is responsible.  Rodman himself is buried in a spectacular way in one of two chapels at the base of a tower that serves as the family mausoleum at the Church of Saint James the Less, five and a half miles up the Schuylkill River from here.  His father, John, is buried in the other chapel.

The rolling hills above the river that were once countryside are now graveyards – there are cemeteries to the south, and to the north and east the city is a sort of graveyard of industry: the Tastycake Bakery building is there, the old Budd plant, and other hulking memorials to an age of industry in Philadelphia that is well and truly dead and buried.  Penn fishing reels are still made in a small factory nearby – but only a few of them: most of the reels are made overseas.

Across the street from the Wanamaker tombs, in the basement of the church hall, five bicycles were recently raffled off to kids from the neighborhood.  They were little kids’ bikes, with training wheels, and brightly colored paint jobs, and heavily padded handlebars.  I don’t think they were especially good or expensive bikes, but I’m sure the question of their quality would hardly matter to the kids who will ride them.  The bikes were donated to be gifts at the Christmas party that was taking place in the basement of that church hall: a Christmas party for the neighbors around the church, many of whom are aware that they are living alongside graveyards.  Those neighbors have seen the bakery and the plants close down, the jobs disappear, the homes foreclosed or abandoned and boarded up.  They can remember when Tastycake was hiring, but it is a distant memory. 

They have seen the drugs and the guys who push them show up on the street corners, where kids who have already failed at school have nothing to do but hang out.  You can see the school from the street corner, and you could be forgiven for thinking it is a prison: it looks a lot like one.  And your chances of learning much there are only a little better than they probably are in prison.

They have even seen the church shut down – five years ago, when after a dispute with the bishop the congregation pulled up stakes and moved away, locking the gates behind them, and bringing to an end the tutoring programs, and other ways they’d reached out to kids in the neighborhood.

With the gates locked and the lights off, and high walls surrounding the place, and a graveyard and the Wanamaker tombs on one side of the street by the church, the other side of the street – where the church hall is located – became another kind of graveyard, to add to the landscape of the dead and dying in the neighborhood.

But now, with a lot of help from Saint Mark’s, an effort is being made to unlock the gates around the old church hall, and to turn that old building and its grounds into a good school for kids from the neighborhood.  There are classrooms there already, with chalkboards and chalk and erasers, that have not been used in years, but which apparently have a longer half-life than some more modern educational tools (all the old computers there are useless!). There are desks and chairs and some books.  There is a chapel and a cross and a bible.   There is a big grassy area to play in.  And there is a big gym in the basement with hoops and some half-inflated basketballs, and where five little bicycles with training wheels were raffled off the other night during a neighborhood Christmas party.

I was supposed to go to that party, but I had two other events here in center city to attend the same evening, and so I missed it.  I didn’t know there were going to be bikes raffled off.  I didn’t know there would be a room full of kids who were happy to receive other presents that night, too.  I didn’t know what I’d be missing; I just missed it.

It’s easy to miss Christmas without even knowing it. And that’s not because of department stores and all the demands of shopping and baking and Christmas parties and everything else.  It’s easy to miss Christmas because we forget what God is like and what his power looks like.  We think that God must be like a slightly larger version of John Wanamaker – a great and distant figure of the past, who had access to whatever he wanted, a grand court to live in, a staff to do his bidding, able to call on the president of the United States when he needed him, as Wanamaker did.  We assume God could hire the best architects to build him the largest and finest buildings – he certainly seems to have done so in days gone by!  And if he was going to put his Son in charge of things, you’d know who he was: he’d carry on the traditions of his father, and build up his legacy, just as Rodman did.

But every Christmas, even as we find ourselves in the Grand Court listening to the carols on the great organ, and watching the lights, and leaning our backs up against the eagle, we remember that even if it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Jesus is not likely to be found amongst the sweaters and handbags, perfumes, scarves and shoes of Wanamaker’s or any other store  - even with a money-back guarantee.

In fact, even in churches like this one, we have to set up a special place – a manger, where the bedding is straw, and there is room for the animals – because our own surroundings are too grand…

… and because it would be too difficult, or too unseemly, to bring you all into the basement here.  We’d have to stoop down under the pipes that run just by the entrance, reminding the person behind you to “watch your head.”  We’d look for the dingiest corner – the kind of place a mangy old cat might have made a bed for himself if he stole into the basement through an open window.  From there, we’d see where the figures for our manger scene spend most of their year, under a tarp, in a corner of the basement.

But once a year we haul those old figures upstairs and build a crude manger for them with straw in it, to help us remember that in his Son Jesus, God showed himself to be what you might call a basement God: a God who can be found in the dirt and the mud, among the castaway things that we can’t quite decide to throw away yet.  In Jesus, God showed that he was not only willing but interested in being found in places that John Wanamaker might never have stepped foot in.  And in Jesus God showed us a different kind of power – so awesome that the most powerful man of his day, King Herod, tried to recruit spies to find out about it so he could destroy it.

The Christmas story is many things, but it is always a story of the power of weakness.  It is always a correction to our way of thinking that power is force and greatness, and ammunition, and numbers, and kilowatts, and horsepower, and tons, and armor, and wealth, and gold, and frankincense, and myrrh – which don’t seem to have lasted the Holy Family very long, or even paid for Jesus’ college tuition.

The Christmas story reminds us that when we see power gone amok – as we can see every time we open the paper, or flip on the TV, or browse the web – and we wonder about it all…

… the Christmas story reminds us to go have a look in the basement and imagine a baby being born there who would teach the whole world to love one another, and would die in order to teach us what that love might look like.

And if I have one regret this Christmas, it is only that I didn’t make it to a church basement a few miles from here for a Christmas party where five bikes with training wheels were raffled off to five kids who will ride them around a neighborhood that might be nothing but a graveyard, but will seem like heaven to them the first time those training wheels come off and they feel themselves balanced, and flying over the pavement with the wind in their faces.

Because I never made it to the party, I don’t know who donated the five little bicycles.  I don’t know if anyone knows.  I like to think that it may have been the ghost of John Wanamaker, like some Dickensian spirit of Christmases past, present, and to come: a spirit who knows that we are likely to get stuck in the department store he built and never make it down to the basements where Christ is being born year after year because there is never any room at the inn.  I think of his ghost using an old ID card to get into the Macy’s storerooms in the basements of that great old building, and finding a few bicycles to bring up the river to the church nearest his grave, the basement nearest his tomb.   And I think of him pointing to the children who won those silly bikes in the raffle, with smiles on their faces, as if they don’t know they are surrounded by graveyards, surrounded by death in a neighborhood that has seen better days.

And I think old Wanamaker’s ghost looks down into that basement for a moment forgetting that he is already dead and buried, because the possibility of new life seems so real down there in that basement, as though it ought to be a manger lined with straw.

And I think John Wanamaker’s ghost would smile if he could show us that basement and the beaming children and their bikes, and offer it all to us as our Christmas gift, and he’d tell us this is a gift we may certainly return if we are not happy with it, and he’ll give us back every cent we paid for it.

 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Christmas Eve 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia