Saint Mark's Church

If an angel were to appear to me in a dream, as an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream to tell him it is alright to marry that pregnant girl, Mary, he had been seeing, I think I know how I would react.

If an angel were to swoop in through my window, as the angel Gabriel swooped into Mary’s room, to announce that she would give birth to a son, who would be the Son of God, I have an idea of how I would react.

If angels were to appear in the sky over the fields where I tend my sheep, as they did to the shepherds on that first Christmas to sing of the birth of Jesus, I suspect I can predict how I would react.

In each case, I am almost certain that I would find some time to sit down by myself, or with some help (maybe professional help!) to understand what had happened to me, to understand what I had heard, to understand what God might be doing in the world and in my life.

I say this with some certainty, because although I have never had an angelic encounter that I know of, I have been confronted with the need to try to discern what God is doing in my life and in the world, I have found myself trying to figure out what God wants me to do, how God wants me to act, and, most fundamentally, who God wants me to…  and I have noticed that one of my first reactions is to try to make some sense of the situation: to try to understand. I am, after all, a rational person living in a (more or less) rational age.  I have been taught that knowledge is power – and I value that lesson.  I have seen and known in my life the great benefit of taking the time to understand things, ideas, and people that are not at first easy to comprehend.  The impulse to understand is not only predictable, it is welcome in my life, and in the world around me.

And so I feel confident in asserting that if I were Joseph, and I had decided that the pregnancy of my young fiancée – whom I had not known in the biblical sense - was just cause for me to “put her away privily” (as the King James Version so memorably puts it).  And if I had a dream in which an angel instructed me not to be afraid to marry her because the child she was carrying was from the Holy Spirit: a son, whom we should name Jesus because he would save people from their sins… first thing in the morning I would call my analyst!  And as I laid back on the couch in his office, I would begin to try to understand what was going on in my head and in my heart, and maybe, just maybe, I would try to understand what was going on in the mind of God… if I possibly could.

Perhaps you would react the same way.  It is a perfectly normal reaction to events around us – and in many ways, it is the reaction that makes us who we are (homo sapiens: knowing man), this drive to understand.  And that desire has wrought a great deal of wonderful science, music, art, and literature, among other things.

Making sense of things, reflecting on them and finding meaning, is the great gift of humanity: something to be celebrated, nurtured, and encouraged.  This gift comes, I have no doubt, from God, who made us in his own image, and who must delight when we begin to understand dimensions of ourselves and the world around us that are far beyond the grasp of any of his other creatures.  So with the angels, I am sure it comes as no surprise to God that I would set out to understand all the implications of the visitation, the meaning of their message.

But I would struggle in my mission to understand.

If I were Joseph, I would stumble first, I suspect, on the fundamental unfairness of laying such a burden on Mary, and on me, since both of us are basically ill-suited to the task of bringing a savior into the world.

If I were Mary, I would, as Saint Luke tells us she did, “ponder these things in my heart.”  But I fear my pondering would give me restless nights, not peaceful ones, as I tried to imagine a future for this mystery baby now growing, unbidden, inside my womb.

If I were a shepherd, I think I would stop trying to make sense of the angelic message as soon as I arrived at the manger and saw the hopelessness of the situation.  I would write the whole thing off as a function of the wine I had been sharing with my fellow shepherds that night.

Under any circumstances, I believe I would struggle with trying to understand the angels’ message of the coming of Christ.  And I know from my own life how frustrating the struggle to understand can be.  I know what it feels like to pray repeatedly to God to ask him to help me just to understand why he is doing such and such a thing, why he let such and such a thing happen, why he won’t fix such and such a problem, why he made me the way I am…if only I could understand, I so often feel certain, then I could get on with life, then I would let go of my anger or my grief or my confusion, and I could begin to do the right thing.

But sometimes we have to learn that God is not asking us to understand something, that he is not presenting an event or a reality, or whatever to us as an exercise in understanding to be dissected with our minds, comprehended, and preserved in formaldehyde to be referenced whenever we need it.  Certainly, God is not presenting the birth of his Son to us this way, just as he did not present the news of the birth of his Son to Joseph, or to Mary, or to the shepherds this way.

Sometimes, rather than understanding, what God requires of us is acceptance.

The angelic visits to Mary and Joseph did not require understanding, there was no time for it.  These were not seminars that spelled out the logic of God’s action, only announcements that claimed congruence with the voice of the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son!”  There was no contract to be initialed and signed, indicating that Mary and Joseph understood what had been told to them, and were accepting full responsibility for whatever should happen next, and the angels could not, under any circumstances, be considered liable for what might happen in the lives of these two people as a result of the news that they’d delivered.  There was not even time to consult with their own families – and to do so, would surely have led them to different conclusions – as soon as Joseph awakes from sleep and recalls his dream, his mind is made up: he takes Mary as his wife and accepts the child that she is bearing in her womb.

The Scriptures suggest that now and then, as Jesus grew up, his parents gained some understanding of who he was, and what his life meant.  And we take it by implication, since Mary was there at his Cross when he died, that she was granted some understanding of the meaning of his death and his resurrection.  But before she was given to understand, she had to accept Jesus, accept what God had in mind, even if she could not understand it.

And the same holds true for each of us.  There is so much of the world that we can understand.  But many of the most painful, difficult questions we will encounter in our lives – questions of life and death – will evade our understanding, even as they interpose themselves in our prayers with the taunting question, “Why?  Why?  Why?”

To that question, and answer is not always given.  And it is vexing that the angels are not dispatched more often to ease the burden of acceptance with their wonderfulness.  Perhaps angelic visitations have slowed to such a trickle because of our dogged insistence to be in control of our lives and the world around us.  We have become so good at enacting the fantasy that we are in control that more often than not we believe this is the truth.  It is only when things go veering out of control – in sickness, disaster, economic collapse, or in the face of death – that we are forced to confront the limits of our control, and our utter dependence on God.  And we do everything we can to avoid such situations.

I’d venture to say that the poor young first-century couple who found angels visiting them in their dreams and in their prayers had less conviction about their own ability to control their lives or the world around them.  They’d have had precious little experience of successfully asserting control in their lives, so maybe it was easier for them to assent to the angels’ instructions.  And for all I know they had neither the inclination nor the facility to reflect much on the meaning of the angels’ message.  But like all of us, they had before them the opportunity either to accept what God was doing or to reject it and do things their own way.  Had they insisted on understanding what was going on, then I guess we might still be waiting for God’s Son to be born.

But Mary and Joseph heard the message of the angels; they must have seen what it meant for them: confusion, difficulty, pain, and sorrow, but not without joy… and they accepted what God had in mind for them.  And the angels rejoiced, and soon we will join them their song!

May God give us all not only minds to inquire and understand, but hearts to accept his divine will, and the birth of his Son, and may our acceptance of God’s will and of his Son give the angels cause for singing.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 December 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

If you paid attention to the readings this morning, you might be confused.  First we heard Saint Paul’s helpful assurance that “we know what time it is.”  Then, minutes later, from the Gospel, we heard Jesus warn, “about that day and hour no one knows…  Keep watch, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”  So by now you might be wondering what the Bible is trying to tell you.  Do we know what time it is, or not?  The answer, of course, is yes, and no.

It is Advent Sunday, the beginning of the church year.  We have begun again to move through the cycle of time that leads us to a baby’s crib in Bethlehem, and then to a Cross on a hill outside of Jerusalem, and to the empty tomb, then to an upper room where the Holy Spirit rushes through, and so on.  This is the wheel of sacred time turning its grand arc, beginning at the beginning and leading us to the end.  So you would think that we begin with first things first.  But we do not.  In the church it is our custom to begin with last things first.  While we are preparing straw to fill the manger, we are also contemplating the end of time, which, it would seem, is when the prophecy of Isaiah will finally come true that we will beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, for we are surely not there yet.

Sing a hymn in Advent, and you are likely to discover that you are singing not about the excitement of waiting for the baby Jesus, but about the wonder and awe of his second coming: Lo!  He comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain.  Here, on the first day of a new church year: last things first.

Traditionally the church has identified the four “last things:” Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.  These are our points of reflection as we wait for Jesus.  These are the mysteries beyond the veil that Saint John the Divine was shown in his Revelation.  These last things remind us that we only pretend to be waiting for a birth, that we are re-living that ancient story even while we wait for the final chapter when God’s time is fulfilled, when Christ comes again, and when all history culminates in a second big bang of God’s creating and saving power.  So, last things first: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

Start with Death, because we can all agree on that; we can all agree there is such a thing, anyway.  Death is the thing we have most in common with Jesus, and it is the place where we are most tightly bound to him, for it is in his dying that the certainty and fullness of his humanity is known.  Tempting as it is to see him as super-human, we see in Jesus’ death that he is simply (but not only) human.

When we were joined to Jesus in the Sacrament of Baptism, the church told us that we were being baptized into his death.  By this we mean that our journey in life is inextricably linked to his journey through death; that the apple-eating, rule-breaking, take-what-I-want-and-worry-about-the-consequences-later, fig-leaf-wearing-because-all-of-a sudden-I-am-ashamed-of-the-beautiful-creature-lieness-of-the-body-God-made-for-me, crouching-in-fear-because-of-the-sound-of God-walking-in-the-Garden-and-coming-toward-me…

… that every fault I share with our first parents, and some that I have perfected on my own, every one of them can be buried with Christ and left for dead, as we take on the new life he is calling us to lead.

And, of course, we are linked to Christ in death because our earthly lives will end in death as surely as his did.  He does not ask us to go where he has not already gone.  So, last things first.

Next is Judgment where we meet Christ face to face.  In our own time, judging has become a dirty word, since it implies asserting your standards over against mine, as though your standards were demonstrably better than mine, and as though you lived by them yourself, which I deeply suspect you do not, since our culture tends to suspect that any person judging anything is probably a raging hypocrite.

Jesus does assert his standard over against ours, and his standard is love, a demonstrably better standard than all the other alternatives.  His judgment is the rule of love by which our own lives will be measured.  This is why in his ministry he taught us how to love one another: to live our lives not for our own sakes, but for others, caring about the wounded, sick, hungry, naked, homeless, imprisoned, helpless, the beaten man on the side of the road, the child who depends on her elders.  Be prepared to answer for this measure of your life, because in the end (whenever that is) no other measure will matter.

Judgment is often over-looked in the quest for the meaning of life, but without judgment what meaning could there be in life?  If no one cares, and it doesn’t matter whether we help or harm one another then what sort of life have we been called to live?  Last things first.

Heaven is the happiest of the last things.  In the biblical tradition, visions of heaven may begin in the clouds, but they don’t end there.  They take on a familiar form: the shape of a city, the holy city: a new Jerusalem.  God’s eternal home has its counterparts in our own world, its points of comparison.  It is not just a lifestyle choice that heavenly kingdom is a city and not a meadow.  For God always calls his people to be in community, living with one another, and in the world to come this will be true too, we can surmise.

And heaven is the destination of our life’s pilgrimage.  To speak of heaven is to know that God’s people have someplace to go: a promised land where all is peace, a land flowing with milk and honey where the trials of this world are forgotten.  To be a pilgrim is to know that you are not wandering aimlessly, but that you do, in fact, have someplace to go, even if the way is hard.  Whenever we speak of heaven we remind ourselves of this important truth, and we pray we are strengthened for the journey.  Last things first.

Last among the last things is hell.  Hard as it is for us to conceive of, there is room in God’s imagination for a place of fire and torment, weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

It hardly requires us to stretch our own imaginations to think of such places here on earth.  There are people who suffer unthinkable torment in their lives, perhaps it is implausible that such suffering would not be a possibility on the other side of the grave as well.

Biblical teaching about hell is mostly by inference, and these days the church often speaks with only little confidence about hell, except in this: that part of the mission of Jesus during his three days of death was to visit hell and set free the souls in torment there and bring them with him to the path of salvation.  Fantastic as such a story may seem, it tells us that no place – not even the darkest places of imagination – is beyond the saving reach of Christ’s strong hand.  Last things first.

When we take last things first, it is not because we are like over-eager murder-mystery readers who read the last page first.  It is because we are hungry for meaning in our lives, and we know that God has given this gift of a far-sighted vision of the last things, the sight of which colors our understanding of the present things that generally have our attention.

It would appear that God allows us this vision for two reasons: first to give hope, and second to urge us to watchfulness.  Hope and watchfulness are the dual messages of Christ’s tiny parable today: two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.  Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.  Is this literally true?  Is this how God’s salvation works?  Who can say?  But perhaps Jesus uses this image to urge both hope and watchfulness.  Yes, when all the world has fallen to pieces there is hope.  The Second Coming has all the hopefulness of waiting for a bus, which when you think of it is significant, because you are counting on the bus actually arriving. 

This is the difference between wishful thinking and hope.  Wishful thinking leaves you standing and waiting for a bus that will never come, because it probably never left the station, and maybe doesn’t even exist.  But hope is founded on the certainty that one is coming for you.

But if you are not watchful, if you walk away, turn your back, or start to do something else, you may never get on the bus, may never even see it coming, even though it drives right past you.

But even most city buses are not likely to do this; some of them will even stop in mid-block and open their doors for you if they realize they missed you.  If even a Philadelphia city bus will do this, how much more will God do everything he can to bring you and me into his kingdom?

“You know what time it is,” St. Paul says, “now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  It hardly matters what the hour is, the alarm of hope, soon to be found on the lips of John the Baptist, is calling us awake: the kingdom of God is at hand, make straight in the desert a highway for our God!  And yet, year after year we find the need to renew our faith, replenish it for another year, strengthen our resolve and relocate our hope.  And it is all too true that we know neither the day nor the hour that God will set the wheel of sacred time spinning for the last time, finally bringing all things to their completion.

And so we are called to live with hope and watchfulness, because while indeed we do not know when our Lord is coming, his advent is more than wishful thinking.  And of course, we do know exactly what time it is, now is the moment to wake from sleep, and be prepared for last things first.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

About twenty years ago, an Australian priest living and working as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa received a letter-bomb in the mail that took both his hands off and left him blind in one eye and seriously burned.  As his body recovered, as well as it could, Fr. Michael Lapsley realized that another part of him had been wounded too: his memory, which now carried the indelible story of this violent act against his person.  He began to learn to use the prosthetics at the end of each arm, and to cope with his one-eyed vision.  But what about his memory, which threatened to leave him more permanently wounded than his other, more obvious injuries?

Several years ago, Fr. Lapsley preached a sermon in which he asked this: “Do you know about bicycle theology?  It is when I come and steal your bicycle.  A few months later I come back and ask for forgiveness for stealing the bike.  I am forgiven, but I keep the bike.  Sometimes we reduce forgiveness to saying sorry and we don’t return the bicycle.  Sometimes however, the bicycle cannot be returned.”

He goes on, “As I stand here today, I don’t know who made the bomb [that so injured me], who posted it, and who gave the orders.  I am not full of hatred, and I do not want revenge.  But I have not forgiven anyone, because so far there is no one to forgive.

“Perhaps [some day] the doorbell will ring and a man will tell me: I sent you the letter bomb, please will you forgive me.  Now forgiveness is on the table.  Perhaps I would ask him if he still makes letter bombs.  No, I work at a local hospital, he replies. Yes, I forgive you, and I would prefer that you spend the next fifty years working in that hospital rather than be locked up….

“Dear sisters and brothers,” Fr. Lapsely asks, “do you have bicycles that need to be returned?  Do you carry poison in your heart because you have not yet shared what happened to you, perhaps many years ago?”[i]

One of the most commonly dispensed prescriptions in life is the instruction to forgive and forget: an approach that seems to be born of a near-total lack of understanding of either forgiveness or forgetting, both of which can be very difficult.

Forgiveness and memory are both on the table when a criminal (I think of him as a young man), hangs dying on his own cross beside Jesus, and says to him, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  Forgiveness and memory. 

We are living in a world full of memories that are in desperate need of healing – because we have littered the world with the limbs we have blown off each other, the lives that have been destroyed, the carelessness with which we treat our neighbors, the injustices we tolerate on a daily basis, the hatreds we allow to fester.  Some of us have stolen bicycles, others of us have had our bikes stolen, and generally the landscape is strewn with the spare parts that are left scattered around, and the poison is still carried in too many hearts.  So what are we to make of a criminal who turns to Jesus and says, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.  Jesus, remember me.”

Do you think that Jesus remembers you?  As you come to church and offer your prayers, carrying with you the memory of the bicycles that have been stolen from you, or that you have stolen and never returned, do you think Jesus knows who you are, recognizes your face, remembers your crimes, holds them against you, feels your pain, cares enough to ease it, sees your memories, wants to forgive you, wants you to forgive, thinks you can forget?  Do you think Jesus remembers you?

With such wounded memories, it can be hard for us to believe that God regards us very much at all.  And when we think of God enthroned in the heavens, or of Christ the King, as the church invites us to do today, we can easily be misled: we can easily begin to imagine that we are mere spectators who have gathered on the parade route to whatever royal event it is that Jesus makes his way to in a horse-drawn carriage.  We know we are supposed to be cheering, waving the flag, and just be happy to catch a glimpse of this sight, so we can tell our grandchildren that once we watched the king pass by and felt our heart swell with national pride.

But the poison in our hearts – that has seeped out of our bleeding memories - makes it hard to cheer as loudly as we think we ought to; hard to swell with much pride at all.  After all, how could Jesus remember me?  How could he even see me in this crowd?  How could Jesus remember me?  And what could he do for me if he did remember me?

When we say that Christ is king, we are not affording him a royal retinue and resigning ourselves to a place on the sidelines of his occasional grand parades through the city.  When we say that Christ is king, we are adding to our hearts the memory of his kingdom, which is the antidote for the poison that has been seeping there.  And Christ is not king because he is the mightiest warrior or the triumphant leader, he is king because he alone has a perfect memory.

This is to say that Jesus remembers you and me perfectly.  He remembers the hurts we have inflicted, and the hurts that have been visited on us.  And he remembers the imprint of God that was given to each of us as we were made.  He remembers how our memories have been wounded, and he wants us to allow his perfect memory to heal those wounds, by allowing him to carry them in his memory, rather than for ourselves, since they are really too heavy for us to bear.

We live in a society that too often thinks it can say whatever it wants, utter any lie, inflict any pain, invade any space, disrupt any peace, violate any loyalty, steal any bicycle if only we think we can get away with it.  And often this proves to be true: often we can get away with murder or lesser crimes.  But do we realize what we are doing to our memories as we shape them with such poison?

Two men hang on their crosses beside the dying Jesus: one of them refuses to confront his memory, but the other cannot escape his even at this last hour, especially at this last hour.  And that man turns and asks, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

We often suppose that our worship of God is an act of our willful remembering of Jesus, as we tell his story, repeat his words, eat and drink the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.  And, in some small way we are remembering Jesus this way.  But more importantly, Jesus is remembering us when we gather around him.  He remembers each of us perfectly, down to the number of hairs on our heads.  He remembers the things we cannot remember any more, and wish we could.  He remembers the things we wish we could forget.  He remembers our pain, our suffering, and our sins.  He remembers our joys and our delights.  He remembers our happiest days and our saddest ones.  He remembers our best selves and the worst possible versions of ourselves.  He remembers every bit of us perfectly as he makes his communion with us.  He remembers the bicycles that have been stolen – who they were stolen from and who did the stealing.  He remembers the lost limbs, the scar tissue, the burns, the blindness.  And he remembers the poison that still lingers in our hearts.

He knows that we wonder whether or not he will remember us.  He hears us whenever we call out, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.  And it delights him to hear that even in our distress we have remembered his kingdom: that there is a holy realm, sometimes near at hand, where he is king, and where his perfect memory has healed the battered memories of countless souls; where it has displaced the poison that we tried to carry around as if it wouldn’t kill us.

Dear sisters and brothers, do you have bicycles that need to be returned?  Do you carry poison in your heart because you have not yet shared what happened to you, perhaps many years ago?

You can begin to heal your memory by telling this to Jesus today, as you make your way to his altar, to receive the gift of his Body and Blood, and discover that the poisonous memories that have been making you sick to your stomach (or worse) are healed by the memory of a kingdom yet to come where Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords, and he remembers that you are his most precious child, and he wants you to inherit the kingdom.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

21 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] From a sermon preached by Fr. Michael Lapsley, SSM at Evensong, Westminster Abbey, 5 November 2006, text found on www.healingofmemories.co.za

Next Friday evening, if you care to see a minor spectacle, you can come out to see me ride on horseback through the city with the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry, whom I serve as Assistant Chaplain.  It is quite a thing to see the Troop riding in formation – with their braided and buttoned tunics and epaulets, their high black boots, and their helmets topped with a swoop of bear fur.  I, however, will be wearing basic black.

It will be hard to tell on Friday that many of the men you see have recently served with the National Guard in deployments in Bosnia, Iraq, and Egypt, and their next deployment will probably be to Kuwait or Afghanistan in 2012.  They will appear to be playing the part of soldiers from a bygone age, when in fact, many of them are real soldiers, at least one weekend a month.

I was reminded of this fact recently when at a gathering of some of the men, we heard recounted again the story of the most recent Purple Heart awarded to a Trooper during the deployment in Iraq.  That story (a harrowing one to my ears) is told, among this set, with some laughter and barely concealed admiration.  And, perhaps for obvious reasons, this morning’s gospel reading put me in mind of it, in a more serious way.  “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus warns, as he warns, too, about earthquake, famine, and plague, and personal betrayal, as time moves toward the fulfillment of God’s intentions and a new era of the reign of his kingdom.

Many Christians – probably many of us – do not really know what to make of these kinds of warnings, or what to think about what God’s intentions for the future time might be.  But we hear a crazed insurrectionist note in what Jesus says this morning that puts us on edge.  And we may worry that it has become all too easy to interpret the various lunatic wars we are part of or can read about as a part of God’s plan.

But to my ears the single most important part of Jesus’ warning is this: “But not a hair of your head will perish.”  How can this possibly be?  Amongst all the violence and catastrophe Jesus predicts, can all his disciples expect to be kept safe?

That is a question I do not know the answer to.  But what I hear in what Jesus teaches is the assurance of two things: first, that the violence of the world we live in is to be expected before God’s will takes a more perfect hold on us all.  And second, that God’s children will be protected when God’s time is fulfilled.

I think about the story of that Purple Heart, and the man I ride with, to whom it was awarded.  And I think about the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers that have returned home from Iraq and Afghanistan in the past eight years, and about the thousands who only came home to be buried.  And I want to know why all the hairs of their heads were not kept safe.  I want to know why they were not protected from harm, why their lives were cut so tragically short.  To what end?  I want to know.

But the answer to that question eludes me.  And I am able to reach only one conclusion: that none of this warfare is part of God’s plan.  Jesus’ accurate prediction of wars and catastrophe does not mean that the violence they wreak is part of his plan.  For God’s plan is that not a hair of our heads should perish.

It brings me a feeling of shame to think that good men and women – thousands and thousands of them – have been asked to fight in wars that most Americans do not believe in and would not fight in, indeed that most of our leaders do not believe in and would not fight in.  And when I ride beside men who have been called to take up arms, and who will be called to do so again, it is with a singular intention: so that I can pray, sometimes audibly, that God’s will may some day come to fruition, and not a hair of their heads will perish.

May God protect all his children in every place where wars and disasters threaten them. 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

14 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The great Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, once wrote a little story about a man who goes to see the king to ask him for a favor:

“Give me a boat,” [the man] said….

“And may one know what you want this boat for?” [the king asked]….

“To go in search of the unknown island,” relied the man.

“What unknown island?” asked the king, suppressing his laughter, as if he had before him one of those utter madmen obsessed with sea voyages, whom it would be as well not to cross, at least not straight away.

“The unknown island,” the man said again.

“Nonsense,” [the king asserted,] "there are no more unknown islands."

“Who told you, sir, that there are no more unknown islands?” [from the man.]

“They are all on the maps,” [this from the king.]

“Only the known islands are on the maps,” [said the man.]

The king: “And what is this unknown island you want to go in search of?”

“If I could tell you that,”[the man replied,] “it wouldn’t be unknown….”

“And you came here to ask me for a boat?”

“Yes, I came here to ask you for a boat,” [said the man.]

“And who are you that I should give you a boat?”

After a bit more cross-examination, the king finally relented and agreed to give the man a boat.  So he sent him down to the harbormaster with a note.  And this is what the note said: “'Give the bearer a boat, it doesn’t have to be a large boat, but it should be a safe, seaworthy boat, I don’t want to have him on my conscience if things should go wrong.'  When the man looked up, this time, one imagines, in order to say thank you for the gift, the king had already withdrawn."[i]

Many of us came to church today expecting that the message would be all about money; after all it is Commitment Sunday, when we ask you to make your commitment of financial support to the work and ministry of this parish.  And since we live in a society that has a somewhat unhealthy relationship to money – in which its hoarding and unjust distribution is looked upon as a great virtue – it would be reasonable to spend fifteen minutes or so examining our attitudes about money.  And next year I may very well ask you to do that!  But this year it seems to me that we might see ourselves more like the man in the story who goes to ask the king for a boat.

And if I told you that we were asking for that boat in order to go in search of the unknown island, would you think of me as one of those madmen obsessed with sea voyages whom it would be as well not to cross, at least not straight away?  Would you fire back at me that this is nonsense, that there are no more unknown islands, that all the islands are on the maps?  Would you begin to think twice about whether or not we really need a boat?

Because a boat, as anyone who has ever owned one knows, is a hole in the water down which you throw large sums of money, and watch that money sink away into the wet darkness.  You must pay for a mooring, and you have to cover the costs of crew and provisioning.  There is lots of maintenance on a boat, which is always succumbing to the corrosive effect of the water.  Plus there is fuel and other supplies.  And there are always repairs on a boat, lots of repairs.

If I told you we had come here to ask the king for a boat, would you ask me if I had really thought this through carefully?  And would you ask me to explain to you again about this unknown island?  How can I be so sure that there is an unknown island out there to be discovered?  Aren’t all the islands already on the map?  But of course I will assert to you that only the known islands are on the map.

Jesus always called his disciples to go with him to an unknown island.  Even when he assured them that they knew the way, the destination was always something of an unknown island.  And the Christian journey is, in many ways, a voyage in search of the unknown island.

For some the journey gets off to an easy start, as it does for the fishermen, who are used to boats anyway and find it easy to answer Jesus’ call to “follow me.”

For most of us, it is a voyage that leads, at some stage through the narrow straits of repentance, when we try to turn from our old sins, and live the new life of searching for the unknown island.

For some it leads through forgiveness of others, and acceptance of things we cannot change, which is also a lesson that needs to be learned by those whose search requires them to give up old habits, fight destructive addiction, and learn a new way of living.

For many of us the search for the unknown island requires us to learn how to give thanks, to learn humility, and to be willing to serve others.

For some, the journey is aided immensely by selling what you have and giving the money to the poor.

For others it is a painful journey that leads through sickness and suffering.  And we don’t know why this is so, any more than we know why one day sees clear sailing, and the next day we are buffeted by storms that make us wonder if we should have ever left port.

But always, always in the Christian life we are searching for the unknown island, which is to say that we are confronting our conviction that there is at least one unknown island left for us to discover.  And some days this seems more likely than others.

Every day in this parish we stand before God and ask him for a boat in order to go in search of the unknown island.  Unlike the king in story, God already knows where all the unknown islands are, but these are the secrets of God’s heart.  We cannot expect him to divulge them.  But we can and we do expect him to give us a boat.  For he already knows the answer to another question the king in the story asked, “Who are you that I should give you a boat?’  He knows you are the work of his own fingers, a beloved child, made in his own image, and brought back to redemption with the precious blood of his Son Jesus. 

God always gives us a boat.  He has given us this magnificent church to worship in.  He has given us a mission to care for the poor and the hungry.  He has given us one another, in a wonderful community of love.  He has given us work to do at Saint James the Less, and in our mission trips abroad.  And he has given us a song of faith to sing day by day by day.

In our enlightened world, we are often told that there are no more unknown islands left; that all the islands are already on the maps.  That such searches are, in fact the undertakings of fools who have been taken in by an old superstition.  We might as well be chasing a white whale.

But we see every day a world that yearns for justice, freedom, peace, forgiveness, healing, and love.  In such a world, if there are not unknown islands left to be found, then we are living without hope.

And many people believe that giving money to the church is as foolish as financing a boat to go after that whale: very much like throwing it down a hole in the water, where it sinks into the wet darkness.  But I suspect that these are those who do not believe in the unknown island, and who prefer to cling to their money though it brings little hope or peace or joy into the world.

You might think that the Tale of the Unknown Island is an adventure story, but Saramago’s version is actually a love story.  And I believe that God’s version of this story is also a love story.  He calls his people – no matter how broken, poor, sick, or unworthy we may be – to follow the way to the unknown island, where he promises we will at last find peace, mercy, healing, forgiveness, hope, and love.

Every day, I ask God for a boat, for me and for this parish family, and every day God answers that prayer one way or another.  God is always willing to give us the boat, and show us the way.  There is always need, however, for the rest of us to give our share for the journey.  And I suppose we do a better job of that if we have a greater faith that there is an unknown island of God’s love to be found.

Speaking for myself, I’d have to say that from this vantage point on Locust Street, I’ve always thought that it is easy to look out over the vast, spiritually empty miles that surround us, and see land that looks a lot like what was, until now, an unknown island.  For while this parish is not the final destination to which God calls us, I feel certain that you can see it from here!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

7 November 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

[i] Jose Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.  London, The Harville Press, 1999