Saint Mark's Church

They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.  (Jn. 21:3)

Shortly after I added a second dog to my household, I realized in no uncertain terms that I had become dependent, not on the company of my dogs (which, of course, I am) but on the help of several people, chief among them, Kent John, known to many of you as the person who is the first to come to work at Saint Mark’s every day, the last to leave, and the lowest paid.  Kent John is also devoted to my dogs, and can be relied upon to look after them when I go away, to walk them if I am at a late meeting, to feed them, coddle them, and generally dote on them in the extreme.  After adding the puppy to the mix last fall, I said to Kent John that I would like to think that I am capable of raising this puppy and taking care of my other dog on my own, but I was awfully glad I didn’t have to find out.

There many things in life, not much more complicated than taking care of a dog, with which we regularly need help.  Around Saint Mark’s, opening the safe or dealing with the copy machine are regular challenges that leave several of us calling for help.  In many homes it’s opening pickle jars or threading needles that constitute simple tasks for which help is almost always required.  In some families it’s getting directions and navigating in the car that are better delegated to someone not in the driver’s seat: help will be required.  None of these things is a complicated task.  It’s not as though a person shouldn’t be able to manage without help, but somehow in our lives we discover that we simply wouldn’t accomplish a number of simple things without help.

Most of Jesus’ well-known disciples were fishermen, but in the New Testament, their most publicized moments at work in their trade are when they are unlucky with their fishing nets.  They need help, as the Gospel reading today shows us.  Now, this would appear to be a problem, since fishing was not just a hobby or a pleasant pastime for these men, it was their livelihood.  It is the first thing we know about Peter and Andrew and James and John, when they are introduced to us: they are fishermen.  And it is one of the very few biographical facts we know about them at all.  Yet throughout the entire New Testament, these disciples – who we see at work several times – are never reported to have caught a single fish without the help of Jesus.  Think of it.  Either they are utter failures, completely inept at their trade… or there is a message here to be learned.

Now I don’t know much about fishing, but I know that this is not Deadliest Catch we are talking about.  This is small time: small boats, small nets, small fish.

And they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

Remember that the scene here is in the days after the resurrection of Jesus, the days after Easter.  Perhaps the disciples are going fishing because life is returning to normal and their checking accounts are running low.  After all, they have been missing a lot of work, what with Passover, and then the trial of Jesus, his crucifixion, their mourning, and now the several, strange appearances he makes to them, in locked rooms, or traveling on the road, and now on the shore.

In any number of the episodes that the risen Jesus shows himself to the disciples they do not recognize him.  And this is one such occasion.  When he tells them to cast the net on the right side of the boat, they are not following the instructions of the Lord of the Universe, recently risen from the dead, they don’t know it’s him; they are taking advice from some guy on the shore, and they are hoping that perhaps he knows something they don’t.

Of course, when they do as he tells them to they catch so many fish that they can barely haul them all in.  Now, it might be that these guys are capable of getting by as fishermen on their own, but it seems an awfully good thing that they don’t have to find out.  When they fail at the work they expected to do on their own, Jesus helps them, and with his help their nets are full.

Well, here we all are in the days after Easter.  Life has returned to normal (it didn’t take long).  There is work to be done, the taxes had to be filed last week.  Lovely as Easter was, we have to get on with our lives, go to work, pay the bills, watch the Phillies lose.  Maybe we had a warm, fuzzy feeling at Easter, but it’s faded now.  And if Jesus seemed like a big part of our lives for a weekend, well, now it’s back to church as usual, if at all.  It’s back to the fishing boats, so to speak.

But remember, in the New Testament, the disciples never catch a single fish without the help of Jesus.

I wonder what you and I are trying to do that we think we ought to be able to do on our own but that we cannot do without the help of Jesus.

I wonder about the work we do every day at Saint Mark’s: from the humdrum work of taking care of these old buildings and ironing the linens, and making copies at the copier, to the more lovely working of offering our prayers and praises to God every day, to the good work of making soup for the hungry and feeding them, to the more challenging work of establishing a school at our mission at Saint James the Less.

And I wonder about my life and about yours: about nurturing meaningful relationships, caring for the people in our families, tending to the elderly and those who are sick, or just to those who are far away.  I wonder about how we deal with what we euphamize as our “inner demons” as though we could not describe them more clearly, even though we know exactly what our personal miseries look like: the depression, the self-loathing, the sleeplessness, the hatred, the anger, the fear, the addiction, etc, etc, etc.  What are we trying to deal with on our own that we cannot manage without the help of Jesus?

Easter, just two weeks away, already seems a distant memory.  The flowers are gone.  Angels have fluttered back to their heavenly coops.  Trumpets have been sent off to other, better-paying gigs till next year.  And it’s back to work in the fishing boats of our lives.

How sad it is to sit in the boat in the cool dark of the last hours of the night with nothing at all in our nets.

But there is a man standing on the shore shouting something: “Children, you have no fish, have you?”

No.  No, we have no fish, we have nothing.

Cast your nets to the right side of the boat.

And you know, of course, what happens next.

You think you can get through life on your own.  You think you are strong, smart, sophisticated.  Or at least you think you are capable enough to get on from day to day.  You think you ought to be able to make your own living, solve your own problems, and determine your own future.  I certainly think all these things about myself, much of the time.  We think that we ought to be able to catch fish on our own.

And does it surprise us how often life leaves us with empty nets strewn around the bottom of the boat?  And how heavily hangs the sorrow in our lives of the repeated trips out in the boat, night after night, giving it everything we’ve got, doing the best we can, and still coming up empty handed?  We don’t let on, how much this hurts us, but it does; it weighs heavily on our souls that we cannot do the things we think we ought to be able to do.  Even though the whole world thinks we are successful, we know the places in our lives that we just fail again and again: no fish, nothing but empty nets.

And I don’t know why you come to church, and it doesn’t really matter to me.  But I do know that if you are here, you are within shouting distance of the shore on which a man is standing, who mostly you and I do not recognize.  He is telling us not to give up.  He is telling us that we can do what we set out to do.  He is telling us that there are fish waiting to be caught.  For all we know he has been calling to the fish, as well, talking to them, guiding them to the right-hand side of the boat.  He knows that we have begun to feel like failures, and certainly to look like failures to much of the rest of the world. 

And it takes some faith to pay attention to him, because he does not seem to us to be the Lord of the Universe, recently risen from the dead.  He is just some guy on the shore shouting to us.  But his voice is carried to our ears on the loveliest breeze, scented with orange blossoms that even overcomes the odor of fish in this boat.  And it seems to us that we should do what he says, though we can’t say why, for sure.  Except that we know, we have read about these experiences that others have had before of not knowing, not recognizing, not seeing.

And there is that gentle, sweet-scented breeze that seems to be stirred up by something we cannot explain.

“Cast your nets,” the voice comes to us, “on the right side of the boat.”

And what have we got to lose?  Who knows but that when we bring them up they might be so full we cannot haul them in?

We would like to think that we could have done it our own.  But if we need help, it is OK.  There is this voice, this gentle breeze to help.  And all we have to do is cast our nets, which is to believe.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

18 April 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

There are certain things that, if you learn them early in life, they seem to leave an indelible mark. Those who grew up in the Depression for instance, like my grandmother, who despite forty or fifty years of plenty, has never been quite able to root out the, um, thriftiness, shall we say, when it comes to issues of money. I would certainly never say, “penny pinching” or “cheap” within a mile of my grandmother, but those words have occasionally crossed my mind.

In the same way, in my youth, I was exposed to a product, a yeast product, and have never been able to quite get away from it, and yet I understand that some people find the idea of it noxious, its scent horrible, its taste excruciating, the sight of it something to avoid. I am speaking here of Marmite, that most famous of British exports, short of the Beetles, the British Empire and Anglicanism. Now the cynic might say that the only reason that I like Marmite is because the yeast in it comes from a certain famous brewer in Burton-on-Trent, who brews one of my favorite beers. Those who are not of the elect, who fail to appreciate Marmite appropriately, can certainly say some very cruel things. I met a gentleman in England once, who was from the American South, who described Marmite as “toxic waste in a bottle.” But those of the Marmite persuasion understand the panacea that it is: powerful flavor for the mouth, health for mind and body, strength for arm and a sign of identification with that most significant and sublime of cultures: England. Unfortunately, not everyone is as advanced as I am: Those who love Marmite swear by it, those who do not, swear at it. There is no middle ground, no via media when it comes to Marmite.

There are, of course, lots of things in our lives which are as polarized as love or hatred of Marmite. In American culture today, this polarization runs most clearly as the demarcation between two very voluble extremes. One can only be pro-choice or pro-life; one can be either pro- or anti-gay marriage. One is either pro-drilling or pro-planet.

The way that one recognizes these extremes as issues in the culture wars is by a certain logical inconsistency. To be on the political right in America is to be pro-life as long as one is talking about the unborn, pro-death penalty when it comes to criminals, and agnostic when it comes to the deaths caused by ecological destruction, or poverty except in as much as either interferes with our economy or our American way of life.

And the left doesn't fare significantly better. To be on the left side of the political spectrum in America is to protect free speech (as long as I agree with it), to react against and stereotype those who feel strong emotions about flag and country, or simply fail to live on the coasts, and to scream about the destruction of the planet without worrying about the destruction of lives and livelihood that can result from the closure of coal mines and power plants, tobacco farms, and automotive plants.

And surely no one believes that the Church is in a much better state. Indeed, in the way that the church so often operates, we have simply baptized the wide-ranging debates and rhetoric of our cultures and transformed them into the political and ecclesiastical debates of our day. Which is not to say that the debates of our day are not significant and important, but that in the rhetoric which is flung to and fro between Fort Worth and New York, or the United States and Uganda, there is a great deal which is not actually about human sexuality or the role of women, which is instead about power, and culture, and a difference in linguistic and philosophical frameworks which we cannot truly ever escape. One either, in other words, loves Marmite or hates it.

But after all, you are not simply here to hear me share of my wisdom on the cultural or ecclesiastical debates of the day. You are here to hear me talk about the Gospel, and I started with Marmite, and with things that we have learned and the debates in our church because there seems to me to be an analogy here. I think of this polarization when I think about Thomas. The standard simplistic modern gloss on the passage is to think of it in terms of our own modern alienation from faith and myth, to think of Thomas as the post-Enlightenment skeptic, who is looking for tangible, scientific evidence of the resurrection, before he will make an intellectual assent to Jesus' being raised from the dead. But that is simply a projection of our own modern schizophrenia: of the false dichotomy that we tend to draw between science and faith, and of the modern understanding of belief as an intellectual process that one needs to flog oneself into.

The reality of the passage is more complicated, of course. The way we know that the passage is more complicated is that Thomas has already seen signs and wonders. He's not just your average skeptic, because he says “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” He has lived with and followed Jesus for a couple of years now. He's seen healings and signs and wonders. He may have had a draught or two of miraculous wine. He's not suddenly developed a scientific conscience. Oh no, something else is playing out in this story about Thomas and the Twelve and I have a sense that it is about defensiveness and about feeling hurt. In fact, I have a sense about Thomas generally: that he's sensitive, that when he goes for something, it is 110%, that he makes decisions like falling down a well, and that he gave his heart and soul to something, namely Jesus the Messiah, and he's been pretty bruised by the recent unpleasantness.

Even when his friends and companions in the roller-coaster ride that has been the past week in Jerusalem are telling him that they've seen the risen Jesus, Thomas isn't budging. Oh, he may hide behind the veil of skepticism, that’s the easy way, isn’t it? Who has ever heard of a dead person returning to life? But in reality I’m guessing that Thomas is simply hurt.

The importance of the Gospel this morning is not whether we resonate with Thomas and his defensiveness, or his espoused skepticism, or whether we resonate with the other apostles, but whether we recognize the graciousness of Jesus, to Thomas, to the apostles, to all of us wherever we fall in the polarizations of our lives. Because Jesus comes to the other apostles wherever they are, and he comes to Thomas under the terms that Thomas sets and he comes to all of us, whatever terms we may set for him.

The importance of the passage is not that Thomas should flog himself into belief, or feel guilty for his guardedness, nor that we should feel guilt in moments of doubt, but that Jesus still comes to Thomas and to us. Thomas doesn’t need to have it right, he doesn’t need to prepare himself to receive Jesus – because Jesus is already there, standing before him, showing his wounds.

It is a very human heresy that says we need to be in the right place to receive God's grace. There is no right place, there is no place at all, other than the one that we all find ourselves in: entrenched, guarded like Thomas, hackles up, and God comes to us on our own terms, and bids us see his own woundedness, and yet believe.

Which brings me back to Marmite and the culture wars and everything in our lives that is loved and hated.

Jesus comes to all of us, regardless of where we are. Jesus comes to us, whether we are convinced of the prophetic nature of the election of a certain suffragon in Los Angeles or not; whether we are certain liberal or curmudgeonly conservative, whether we are a garrulous curate or the entrenched bête noire of said curate. Whether we are any of the various ways that we are polarized in life, Jesus comes to all of us and bids us not to doubt but believe.

Believe that God comes even to the liberals and the conservatives; believe that God will bring about his purposes in the messy machinations of the frail Church, believe even that our guarded and defended entrenchments are not the final reality and truth.

Jesus comes to us wherever we are and asks us to believe that those who love Marmite and those who hate it will sit down together, one day, at the Supper of the Lamb. To believe that the judgment of God is not cruel and only for those whom we deem meet for it, but kind and universal, and that in that judgment we will come to be open to judgment and because we are open to God's gentle judgment, we are open also to his grace. For we are none of us, arrived, none of us home, none of us certain. We are all entrenched like Thomas or fled like the other apostles and still Christ comes into our lives, and shows us his very really wounds, and asks us to believe that in his resurrected glory, he is able to bring about unforeseen redemption in our individual lives, in the life of our culture, and in the life of our Church. 

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

11 April 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

The big news of the weekend – some would say the unquestionably good news of the weekend – is the release of the iPad, which went on sale at Apple computer stores yesterday.

Now, I realize that the regular congregation here at Saint Mark’s is more of letter-writing, land-line, rotary-phone, send-a-telegram group of people, who fondly remember party-lines and 6-cent stamps.  So I am counting on you folks who are not always here – you techies who, like me, gave up your land lines years ago, and can vaguely remember what a stamp looks like - to fill in the knowing laughter, and perhaps explain to your befuddled neighbor (who knows exactly when to kneel and when to stand, that’s how you can tell they are regulars here) what in iPad, an iPod, and an iPhone are.  You may also have to explain to them what an app is.

OK, I’ll try.  An app (short for application) is a feature of an electronic device that does something cool – like an alarm clock on your cell phone, or a calculator, or a GPS navigation feature, or a list of all the restaurants that serve Easter brunch within a block of where you are going to church.  You want to know where to go to eat after Mass?  There’s an app for that.

The story is told of an American man who was trapped in the rubble in the earthquake in Haiti who realized he had a First Aid and CPR app on his iPhone, which he used for instructions in treating his wounds, to stop the bleeding.  He also set the alarm on his iPhone to go off repeatedly so he would not fall asleep and go into shock. And he wrote letters to his family on some app or other, lest he should not survive, to tell them he loved them.  The man says that God gave him the tools he needed to survive, which I believe, but some will contend that it was only Steve Jobs.

All this i-excitement got me thinking about whether or not there is an app for Easter.  And I am an iPhone user, so I checked.

There is a Way of the Cross app that guides you through all 14 Stations of the Cross (99 cents).  There is a Good Friday app, which provides devotional material (99 cents).  There is an Easter Egg Painter app (Free) that “allows you to choose any color or size brush to paint a realistic Easter Egg….  When you are finished you can take a screenshot of the egg and send it to friends and family.”  There is the Easter Bunny Tracker app with an “interactive globe and radar map” to “add to the realism as you track the exact whereabouts of the Easter Bunny as he travels thousands of cities the night before Easter.”  It also allows you to “communicate with the Easter Bunny via text” (99 cents).

A search for a Resurrection app turns up nothing very useful – some video games, a Leo Tolstoy novel, something called “The Way to Heaven” which turns out to be a prayer that was revealed to St. Bridget of Sweden and “has 5 promises for those who recite this prayer for 12 years.”  It costs 99 cents, but there must be an app that helps you attain those five promises in less than 12 years, and it’s probably free.

All of which is to say that there is nothing meaningful in the way of an app for Easter.

What would a good Easter app do?

As the women who approached Jesus’ tomb that first Easter morning worried about who would roll away the stone, they might have consoled each other with the assurance that there’s an app for that, though how it works would remain a mystery.

In fact, much of any real Easter app would remain shrouded in a bit of mystery.  It would take time to realize exactly what is going on.  There’d be confusion and uncertainty at first.  There’s be the questions about what happened to Jesus’ body, about who had taken it away and why.  There’d be a scramble to get the men and begin a search.

But then there would be some kind of alert – maybe a “He is Risen” ring tone – that would send Peter and another disciple toward the tomb to see it empty, and the linens lying there, but would leave them unsure, and send them back to their homes to re-think.

A real Easter app would work better for women than men, since the Gospel tells us that they were the first to the tomb, and the ones who were brave enough, even in their confusion, to stay there and try to do something.

And it would have a feature for those who weep, as Mary Magdalene did outside the tomb.  There would be consolation for lost, unhappy, troubled souls like hers, who thought they had found in Jesus some hope, but now began to believe that all that hope was lost, not only buried, but now stolen, too.

There’d be some way it calmed fears, as the angels calmed the fears of the women to whom they appeared, all dazzling.

And there’d be this clear message that turns the world more or less upside down: “Why do you look for the living among the dead.  He is not here, but has risen.”

Why do you look for the living among the dead?  Why do you look for the living among the dead?  (Is there an app for that?)

An Easter app would not only cause spring flowers to bloom, gentle rains to fall at night, and the sun to shine brightly in the daytime.  It would not only bring healing to those who suffer, and strength to those whose healing is not to be given in this life.  It would not only repair broken relationships, bring an end to grudges, and offer forgiveness to hurts inflicted long ago.  It would not only replace the gloom that so easily falls over our hearts, our souls, and all the world with joy…

…  I myself would like to believe that an Easter app would also bring a conviction about the importance of doing something to curb carbon emissions, working to bring an end to warfare, and claiming the right of every American to have affordable health care, but it turns out that’s a White House app!

A meaningful Easter app probably would have some sort of tracking device.  Not to enable us to follow the movements of the Easter Bunny, but to lead us to the graves of every beloved, parent, child, sibling, spouse, and friend.  It would allow us to weep as we made our way there.  But soon there’d be a dazzling light, and the warmth of the sun, and the voices of two men, who frighten us at first but quickly calm our fears, as we dry the tears from our grieving faces, and hear them ask us what they asked Mary Magdalene all those years ago: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

This Easter app would leave us confused, stunned, unsure of how to respond.  But then it would speak in a voice unheard before, but strangely known to us.  And it would say your name to you, and mine to me.  You would turn, and I would.  And the app would somehow help us see the risen Jesus standing there, knowing us, and known by us.  That’s what an Easter app would do.

About five months ago, I ditched my old cell phone and got an iPhone.  I had been planning the move for months, since it meant switching from my old perfectly good cell phone company to AT&T, about which the less said the better.  I was so excited to be amongst the glitterati of iPhone users.  I immediately downloaded an app that helps me keep track of where I park my car, another that is a pitch pipe, and another that makes Star Wars light saber noises when I move my phone around.

May I confess to you that my life has not been changed?

And I am willing to bet that as excited as they may be, all those new iPad owners this weekend will soon discover, that wonderful though it may be, the iPad has not really changed their lives either.

A real Easter app would do that.  It would change your life, by giving you strength where you have been weak, healing where you have been sick, hope where you have known only despair, light where you could see only darkness, forgiveness where you could not find it or give it, joy where you knew only sadness, love where you could taste only bitterness, and, yes, life where you could only find death.

But there is, in fact, no app for that. There is only Jesus.

And if any of us came to church this morning uncertain as to why, thinking perhaps that we are only here remembering something that happened a long time ago, but which, historically speaking, is a little hard to prove.  If we came here remembering that the church chose this time of year for Easter because it meshed nicely with Jewish and pagan customs, of which the bunnies and the eggs are also reminders…

… this morning poses a question for you: Why do you seek the living among the dead?

Or were you only looking for an app, something a little cool to make today different?

Is it disappointing to discover that there is no app for Easter?  There is a sermon – which is not quite as cool as an app, and maybe about as useful

But there is no app for changing our lives, making all the things that are wrong right, all the things that are sick well, all the things that are dead restored to new life.

For that there is only Jesus.  And he is not to be found among the dead.  He is to be found among the living, which means here, with us, now. 

Only Jesus, risen from the grave, not among the dead, but among the living.  Calling my name and yours, hoping, expecting to be recognized, known and loved.

No, there is not app for that.  There is only Jesus, and he is not among the dead, he is risen, he is here.  Thanks be to God! 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Easter Day 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

My parents, in a nice haphazard sort of a way exposed me early on to the basic classical literature and ideas that they thought I needed to know. The raciness of some of the Greco-Roman myths was not lost on them, but they thought that perhaps the myths were not much more risqué than the stories that I was likely to encounter in the Scriptures (which is true) and besides, surely it was better to learn about the birds and bees from the Greeks and Romans than from the gossip and innuendo of schoolchildren or the pages of a magazine. My father, being a scientist at heart, thought that it wouldn't be a bad idea to learn about the classical version of science, and so he taught me about the four elements, of which the ancients thought that all material was composed: earth, air, fire and water. All the elements are present in us: the water in our bodies, the earthy fleshiness of us, the air in our lungs and the fire in our minds and hearts.

I did not long remain with the Greeks and Romans, but moved on into Norse mythology and on from there into the stories of other religions, and soon it became relatively clear to me, even to the mind of a child, that there are certain images and themes, certain fears and hopes that cross the lines of faith, culture, and history. The hero with a thousand faces, the primal fear of darkness, of drowning in deep waters, the panic of the woods at night, the fear of death, the gift and danger of fire, these are images and stories that continue with force and power in all ages and cultures and faiths.

I always feel as if the Great Vigil of Easter is that most fundamental of Christian services because it is composed of those basic images: new fire kindled, water in the font, earth over a tomb, and air coming back into the stilled lungs. And the stories that we recollect tonight, the stories of God's great salvation wrought over many long years are stories that are fundamentally about who we are, why we are the way we are, and how God interacts with us.

First, there is the story of creation. God separates the waters, and draws forth land from the waters. God sets the lights in the sky, the fiery sun and stars, and then out of the earth draws trees and creatures and finally sculpts humans out of the earth, filled with the breath of God. The first act of God that we comprehend and know is that God has created, and created order and brought waters, and fire, and earth and air into some kind of miraculous balance, and declared it good.

But, as has always been, and will be until our final healing, human hearts and minds were capable of darkening, and so the waters that were kept in check were poured out upon the earth, but even in his wrath and destruction, God did not abandon his creation, and saved the earth and air that were animals and humans, and wrote in the air of the sky with water the sign and symbol of his covenant.

Ages later, when his covenanted people, those in the long lineage of Noah and Abraham, were enslaved, God sent his servant Moses to free them and lead them from bondage. He went before them in fire and cloud, and parted the waters so that they could walk on dry earth, and protected and saved them.

And although again their hearts and minds were darkened, God fed them in the wilderness and gave them water from the rock. Though they were forced to walk the earth for forty years, yet still God protected and fed them, and at the last brought them into the Promised Land, where they were home.

Even there, even full of the knowledge of God's sustenance and graciousness, brought into the fullness of God's covenant with them, symbolized in the gift of land, their hearts and minds were darkened, and so God sent the prophets to call them repentance, and to declare to them the graciousness of God: the God who gives waters to the thirsty, and rain and snow upon the earth; the God who transforms the skeletal wreck of death into flesh, and breathes upon that flesh, and restores life to it.

Earth and air, water and fire; the great elements that are present tonight in their primal way, that have deep places in the human mind and experience, and that are the signs of God's action and presence in the world throughout the long record of the forging of God's salvation.

Lent began forty days ago, on Ash Wednesday, with the reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. As quickly as the grass withers, the air will leave our lungs for the last time, and our loved ones will take our bodies, and cover them with earth, and we will return to the ground from which we and all that lives has been drawn. And so the question of tonight, or perhaps of our lives is a simple one: If after lives of unending struggle against the darkness that constantly invades our human minds and hearts, those hearts will stop beating, and we—you and I—will go down to death , what does the little fire we have kindled together in this night matter?

What does it matter if God is evident in occasional moments, in fire, water, air and earth; where is our salvation?

The question is, “Can these bones live?” My bones and your bones.

Tonight matters because the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. The Word became earth and air, was washed with the waters of Baptism and flamed with the fire of the Spirit. The God who is evident in the elements, who creates and sustains the creation, did not in the final peak of his salvation simply operate on the creation, on earth and air, fire and water, but became them. He tramped the earth of Palestine, and ate of the earth's bounty, he drank and sailed the waters, and breathed the wind blowing where it will. And his breathe ceased, and his body died, and he was laid under earth, like we all one day will be.

But the story doesn't end there. If it did, tonight might matter little. The air of his lungs dissipated, his flesh cold as the grave, the fire of his spirit extinguished; for three days there is silence. And yet he rises glorious. Here is the great reversal, not simply God's power acting again and again to save his people, and call Israel back and restore creation, but the death of death, the destruction of sinfulness, the freedom from bond and the restoration of our right humanity. For he carries us with him in his resurrection.

Since we have been baptized with Christ into his death, death no longer is terrible. Since we are the same earth and air as him, since we have been washed with the water of baptism, and burned with the fire of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection raises us up from the darkness and death of our lives and hearts and makes our humanity glorious; our flesh like until his own.

The Word became flesh, and gives of the things of earth to sustain us, wheat for bread, water for wine, the stuff of earth become the things of heaven, all of it changed, redeemed, restored, because Christ is risen.

And this is not mere rhetoric. The darkness of our hearts and minds is there still, the darkness of the world still evident all around us. But as the Word has become flesh, as the light of his fire has burned in the darkness, even so the darkness did not overcome it. Christ rises glorious, scattering matter about him like fire, his breathe is warm and moist, the dust of the tomb still on him, breaking the darkness around him. He comes into my darkness, into your darkness, the real inane darknesses in which we often find ourself, and he bids us rise, and follow him. Christ is arisen as he promised, death no longer has dominion; he is present to us always, and makes of our world an endless delight. He fills our mouths with laughter and fills the hungry with his own flesh and blood. Alleluia, alleluia. Christ is risen.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

The Great Vigil of Easter

3 April 2010

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Last night, as we remembered the Last Supper, at about the hour the sun was going down, we read the instructions for the first Passover from the book of Exodus.  There we find that an unblemished, year-old male lamb is to be killed for the meal.  The people of Israel are told to wait until the fourteenth day of the month, and then to gather together for the sacrifice of the lamb.  And they are told to “slaughter it at twilight,” and to take some of the blood of the lamb and use it to mark the doorposts and lintels of their homes so that God will know which homes to pass over as he tramples through Egypt, wreaking vengeance on the firstborn children of the oppressors of his chosen people.

Twilight is not only that period of soft, grey, diffuse light between sunset and nighttime, when the sun is already below the horizon, but darkness has not yet fallen; it is also, as any teenage girl could tell you, the title and the theme of the story of Bella Swan and her forbidden love for the vampire, Edward Cullen.  Although I am willing to bet not a single one of us here today has read it, the book has sold more than 17 million copies, and spawned two movies which have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.  And it represents the latest installment in a series of romantic obsessions with vampires, who are dangerous, of course, because they need to drink your blood.

My little research about the Twilight phenomenon has brought me the discovery that the book begins with a biblical reference, taking as its starting point the forbidden fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.  However, it would seem that the forbidden fruit of teenage vampire love is the real issue here; any knowledge of Good and Evil takes a back seat.  The twist in the saga of Bella and Edward is that the gallant, hunky vampire actually prevents his beloved from becoming what he is when another vampire bites her.  Edward sucks the vampire venom from Bella’s veins, saving her from his fate of an eternal deathlessness that is not quite living.

The whole premise of the vampire genre always has echoes of the reverse image of the Christian fixation on the blood of Jesus, making it jarring every time we read of Jesus’ instructions that his followers must drink his blood.  These instructions were, of course, given to his disciples at twilight, as they were remembering the slaughter of the Passover lamb at the same hour.  And they were attached to the symbol of the cup of wine he shared with his disciples in such an obvious way that none of them seems to have suspected that he was suggesting some strange new cultish practice with vampiric overtones.  They already knew the symbolic significance of the blood of the lamb; they remembered the blood smeared on the doorposts and the lintels, and the older tradition of the scapegoat sent out into the desert to die, bearing the sins of the people.  And vampires had not yet been invented, anyway. 

What they did not guess, could not see coming, was that twilight would come at noon the next day, as the sky darkened so the Lamb could be slaughtered at the appropriate time, and their Lord was nailed to the Cross and allowed to bleed from his head, his hands, his feet, and his side.

Over on the wall there, at the 12^th Station of the Cross, which depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus, if you were to look closely at the enamel image created by an artist about a century ago, you would see behind the Cross of Jesus a darkened sky, grey-black clouds eclipsing the noonday light to create an early twilight.  On either side of Jesus are the two criminals, and in between each of the criminals and our Lord, there flies a sort of disembodied cherub, clasping a chalice to catch the blood that falls from Jesus’ brow, that sacred head, sore wounded.

Throughout Lent, I have returned to this image week after week in my private devotion.  Because the church is dark, and because the cherubim are clearly not collecting the blood that drained from Jesus’ wounded side (their chalices are held up higher, just below his head), I imagined at first that they were actually gathering Jesus’ tears as he gave up the ghost.  This seemed like a suitably sentimental image for 1928, the year the Stations were given to the church.  And I tend to think that a reflection on the tears of Christ as he offers his life on the Cross for the world would yield some fruit, taking our cue from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, “Is it nothing to you all ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”

We don’t need vivid imaginations to color in the images of Jesus’ sorrow in our own day and age: after a century and more of warfare across the globe; the holy city of Jerusalem still a place of violence and strife; the church plagued by scandal and internecine fighting; a nation that brags about its liberty but cares little for those whose economic status or race or just bad luck leave them with very little freedom at all – certainly unable to break the cycles of poverty and violence; a planet that we continue to destroy as we asphyxiate, cut down, pave over, or drill out, marring its beauty and depleting its resources… just to name a few possible reasons for Jesus’ tears. 

But it turns out the little angels are not collecting Jesus’ tears at all.  It is his blood they are after; patiently waiting for every drop to fall from the thorns of his crown into their chalices.  And I have found myself wondering: what do they intend to do with the blood of Christ they have so carefully harvested at this midday twilight?  Is it to be delivered to his disciples for the doorposts and lintels of their homes, or swallowed in some gruesome ritual after his burial to give his disciples a vampire-like eternal deathlessness that is not quite living?

The Scriptures, of course, never suggest that angels descended from the darkened clouds, or that anyone collected so much as a drop of the blood that drained from Jesus’ veins.  But year after year, for these twenty centuries, twilight has come early every Good Friday, at least in the living memory of the church, and with it comes the remembrance of the Garden where once we lived in happiness, and of the tree, and its forbidden fruit that tempted us with more than teenage angst.  And we know that there is cause for tears as we reflect not only on our human history, but on our own lives, our failings, our diminished hopes and unrealized dreams, the stupid things we’ve done or the good things we ignored doing when we should have.  And we reflect on the pain and the loss in our lives – some of our own making, some of it not. 

And if we think of Jesus on the Cross at all, we might hope that he weeps for us, as much as for himself, if indeed he does weep as he hangs there.

But tears, as any of us who have shed them knows, will only get you so far.  The children of Israel had wept through decades of slavery without relief before God gave them instructions to take a lamb and slaughter it at twilight.

And although the sun is shining brightly on this glorious spring day outside; in here, at this hour, it is twilight.

And in this twilight blood is being spilled.  But the twist in this saga is that by his death, Jesus is not preventing us from becoming what he is: he is helping us become more like him.  He is marking out the way to an eternal life in the world to come by offering forgiveness to us and to the whole world for all the things that cause so many tears to be shed.

“This is my blood,” he said, “which is shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins.”

If angels collected his blood as it spilled from his body, I suppose it must have been in order to bring it to some heavenly dispensary so that it could be distributed one miniscule drop after another over the centuries, to tint the wine in chalices all over the world.  Not so we could be spared living a life like his, but so that we might share in his life and in his death, by which I mean to say not only a life of forgiveness, of grace, and hope and healing and blessing, but also a life that does not end at the grave, but is a new kind of living in the hereafter.

For Bella and Edward, and for so many of us, twilight is a dangerous time, as darkness approaches, and the demons of our lives lurk in shadows, and it becomes safer for them to come out, under the cover of darkness.

And the mystery of God’s love is not only that he supplies the Lamb for the sacrifice he requires (as he always has), not only that he can take spilled blood and use it as a symbol of new life, not only that he forgives us our sins without having to locate a scapegoat year after year. 

The mystery of God’s love is that he makes an early twilight at the middle of the day, when the spilling of his Son’s blood might be a sign of nothing more than the depravity of humankind, and cause for tears…

…but he fills this twilight with a different light that seems to bend around the barriers of our sin and defensiveness, and reaches into the darkest corners of our lives, and gives us hope.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Good Friday, 2010

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia