Saint Mark's Church

These days many of us have learned to worry about becoming the victims of what is called “identity theft.”  The term is something of a misnomer, because the perpetrators of identity theft are not primarily interested in your identity; they are interested in your money, and your credit.  They could care less who you are; what they really want is what you have.

Of course, very little frightens us as much as someone who has access to our stuff, our bank accounts, our credit cards, our treasures.  It is no coincidence that we have all gotten good at remembering various passwords, or that many of us probably have our own document shredders at home.  We don’t want people rifling through our trash, or hacking through our computers to gain access to our money and our credit.  Oh, it’s easy for people to find out our identities – we don’t so much mind that: just look me up on Face Book!  But we don’t want people getting the stuff that really matters: our financial information and assets.

But tonight we have come to get a smudge of ash on our foreheads and be told, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”  And this custom is something of an affront to our identities.  Is it true that all we are is dust in the wind?  Do our identities mean nothing more than that, not even to God?

Interestingly, many people come to church on Ash Wednesday who don’t normally make it a habit to be in church.  There is something like a homing instinct on this day that leads us to this old ritual, to these ashes, and to this strange declaration that you are dust and to dust you shall return.  And that instinct is not activated because our souls fear that in God’s eyes all we are is dust in the wind.  Quite the contrary; our homing instinct kicks in because we suspect that most of the time we have not been living the lives God means for us to live, we have not grown into the selves we hoped to grow into, and our identities have somehow become confused, lost, or stolen among all the demands of our daily lives: from raising the kids, to paying the bills, to caring for the house, and everything else.

Somewhere deep inside us lurks the suspicion that even though our financial records are in order, we have been the victims of identity theft, and it doesn’t have anything at all to do with our credit or our money.  Somehow we suspect that our identities have become overly entwined with our things, our stuff, our bank accounts, our credit cards, or our social status.  And we may begin to wonder if anybody cares about us not for what we have, but for who we are.

So we home in on church on Ash Wednesday.  We may come for a lot of reasons, or no reason at all, but when we get here, we are going to be confronted with the truth of our identities.  Because most of us have been victims of identity theft: somehow the person we meant to be, tried to be, were raised to be, always knew we could be, is nowhere to be found.  The ideals, and hopes, and talents, and brains, and principles and even the looks we once held onto have slipped away.  Hope has been crowded out by depression.  What’s more, we have developed bad habits, forgotten what it was like to exercise self-discipline, and gotten too accustomed to being selfish.  Look in a mirror, and what do you see?  Is it someone you recognize and like?  Or is it a victim of identity theft?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  Like so much else in religion, these words are not as easy to understand as at first they seem.  All we are is not dust in the wind.  It is true that our bodies and all we have (even our credit cards) will return to the ground: dust to dust, ashes to ashes, as the saying goes.  Most of what we guard so carefully in life cannot be saved.  And the church is compelled to remind us of this because we have tended to store up for ourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal.  We have tended to value all those things that are inevitably perishing (including our bodies), and paid no mind at all to our souls.

But we were made to be more than bodies passing through this world for a while; more than the accumulation of our wealth; more than the sum of our credit.  We were made to be citizens of another kingdom: the kingdom of heaven - to which God calls all people.

In the kingdom of heaven our lives take on new meaning; we work for the benefit of others; the poor are not disenfranchised; the rich do not have special privileges.  Justice is accomplished in the kingdom of heaven; the sick are made well without a thought of health insurance.  Peace is the watchword there.  In the kingdom of heaven you are worth more than your credit score!  And in the kingdom of heaven no one can steal your identity, because you are most perfectly and beautifully yourself, your own true identity.

Jesus talked about the moth nibbling away at what does not belong to it and ruining it; about that little trickle of water that causes so much rust over the years and ruins what should rightfully have been yours.  Do we have to name the moths?  Do we have to prove that there is rust?  Isn’t it true?  Is some of it your own fault?  Probably.  Was some of it beyond your control?  Probably, too.

There is a secret about Ash Wednesday that is not at first apparent.  The secret is a white lie in those words: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  For, the truth about Ash Wednesday is that God wants you to have your real self back: the lovely, true, and holy identity that could only ever be yours alone.

Have you strayed like lost sheep?  Have thieves broken in and stolen?  Have moth and rust consumed what was not theirs to take?  Have you let them do it?  Have you let your life turn to so many ashes? 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  But remember this too: you are more than you seem to be.  Saint Paul saw how easily our true identities are taken from us.  And he reminded his fellow Christians in Corinth about the truth: “we are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see-- we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything!”

Like everyone else who has ever languished in prison, Paul knew what it was like to face losing everything – even your own identity.  And he knew the marvelous truth that when your identity is rooted in Christ, no one can ever take it from you!

Because the kingdom of heaven is not a faraway place or in the distant future.  The kingdom of heaven is at hand – this, Jesus came to teach us.  And you and I were made for that kingdom.  There are treasures of unimaginable bliss to be found there that no one can ever take from you.  And you begin by coming here and believing for a moment that little white lie – that you are dust.  And then you begin to ask God to lead you in a new way, and to give you your identity back.  Which it is his joy and glory to do, since he made you in the first place, and rejoices to see you returned to your rightful, beautiful self.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Ash Wednesday 2010
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia


I was reading recently a history of how people in different times and places have interacted and reacted to space, which may sound rather abstract but is actually quite fascinating. Throughout history, people have generally seemed to find a similar awe and amazement in different spaces. The magnificence of Chartres Cathedral has been experienced by people for 800 years without much reservation, but there are some notable exceptions. One of the most interesting examples of people responding very differently in a time and place was the response of people during the 18^th century to the Alps. There was, apparently, no awe or astonishment at the beauty of the Matterhorn; instead people found the Alps rather terrifying, and the practice if one was forced to undergo the trial of crossing the Alps was to travel in a closed carriage so that one would not have to experience the terror of the Alps.

Which I would find incomprehensible except that I think those two emotions, awe and terror are not too far removed from each other, and perhaps go very much hand in hand.

Awe is one of the glories of human emotion – to feel astonished and overwhelmed by wonder at a glorious sunset over the ocean, or the space of a cathedral, or the silence of an old growth forest.

Beyond the awe that we feel at the natural world is the awe that we feel when we encounter the transcendent, indeed sometimes it is the glory of nature that leads us to that encounter with God. Encountering the mystery of the Divine is always awe inspiring, often unexpected, and it is not unusual to have a feeling of unworthiness, of smallness, even of terror in the face of the God who is wholly powerful and other. Like the Alps, we may encounter the majesty of God with terror, with a wish to withdraw and block out the vastness and majesty of that sight.

We have that sense of awe and of unworthiness expressed both in the reading from Isaiah and in the Gospel this morning. The prophet has a vision of the Lord glorious and enthroned and it is the kind of experience that leaves him blind and groping, deeply aware of his own unworthiness in the face of the heavenly court crying “Holy,” shaking the hinges of the Temple with their voices. “Woe is me!” he says, “for I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Simon Peter has a similar experience in the Gospel. After a night of fruitless fishing, as he is washing his nets, Jesus gets into his boat to teach, and once he's finished teaching, he tells Peter to let down his nets on the other side of the boat. Despite how ridiculous the request is, Peter tries it, and ends up swamping both the boats with a massive catch of fish. And like the prophet, Peter is brought up short by an awareness of his own limitation and sinfulness. Falling to his knees he says “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

However we encounter the Divine, it can be a sobering experience that brings home to us our finitude and our own very real lack of perfection, before a God whose worship shakes the doors of the Temple.

And that is not an inappropriate emotion – however much we encounter God in the small things of life, in quiet moments and kind words, or however much we encounter God in the person of Jesus, speaking to us through the Scriptures, God is both encountered in small things, and in the moments of glorious holiness and terror: worth of the adoration of seraphs, glorious and majestic.

It is, I suppose, out of fashion to speak about the overwhelming side of God. Generally we are told that this God is experienced by people as unapproachable, as too reminiscent of the sometimes difficult and judgmental images of God that some of us learned in childhood. Moreover, we are told that God enthroned as King is a difficult image, for most of us have no experience of kings and how can we possibly related to God as an extra-large monarch, with all the trappings of royalty?

Which I suppose is all true in a way, but is also somewhat sad, because if the God of glory and terror is downplayed, or fails to make it into our teaching, preaching and thinking about God, the awe tends to go away as well.

As, of course, does the framework for interacting with God's majesty and power. If you look at both passages that we hear read today, the goal of the vision of God's majesty or the power expressed by the God who is enfleshed is not to make us feel guilty or unworthy, although that might be an unintended effect, but because God simply IS. Powerful and infinite. I am that I am. Glorious, magnificent. Worthy of eye covering worship. Worthy of having the Temple filled with smoke, whether the choir likes it or not. Worthy of that perpetual chant of “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

And rather than our finitude and unworthiness being the occasion for God's wrath or judgment, in both these passages they are instead the beginning of our healing and calling.

The prophet finds himself cleansed and purified, and then when the God of terrible majesty asks for volunteers, the prophet finds himself offering to go “Here I am; send me!”

And rather than Jesus agreeing with Simon Peter that he is unworthy, Jesus simply tells him not to be afraid. We may encounter God's holiness with terror, but we do encounter it, and it changes us forever.

The majesty and wonder of the God of glory is not the terror of judgment. It is the awe that the God whose worship shakes the doors of the Temple, the hem of whose majestic robe fills the Temple, that same God also is available to us in quiet, is present with us in bread and wine, can compact the vastness of that robe down into the frame of a tiny child, and comes to us despite our sinfulness and foolishness, asking “Who shall I send?”

To encounter the God of majesty and power is to come to terms with our smallness before his glory, and our vocation to speak to the peoples, to fish for people, to work as God wills, despite our smallness and sinfulness. Not because we are cowed by his majesty or frightened at his glory, but because the vision of the God of glory brings up in us the deepest awe and wonder, and the will to worship God ceaselessly. “Holy, holy, holy.”

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

7 February 2010

Sometimes the Scriptures give us complex parables to untangle, or esoteric passages nearly illegible with the passage of time, and the preacher must perform feats of extreme hermeneutical acrobatics to come to some sort of explanation. Sometimes the Scriptures give us stories that are obvious, and it is the duty of the preacher to soften the hardness of the teaching, if only a little bit. And sometimes in the Scriptures, there is simply an image, so laden with symbolism and historical import that the preacher gets to simply hold the image up, and slowly turn it for all to see. Simeon, that old man of faith, waiting on God’s messiah and holding the infant Jesus is that kind of image: laden and poignant.

There is, all the way through the Hebrew Scriptures a kind of sad and silent waiting for God. God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Sarah, and Leah and Rachel, the God who chose his people, and made a covenant with them, and led them from exile and through the wilderness, and gave the law, that God, despite the years of prophets, judges and kings, that God is silent, and the people of Israel wait for God’s movement, for God’s salvation with a longing and a hunger of the deepest sort.

For it seems as if God has abandoned his people. As if he has left them, finally, to their idolatry and sinfulness. They couldn’t keep focused on God for the time it took Moses to climb the mountain to receive the law. How could they possibly keep God central to their lives, surrounded by other tribes, by distractions and by the cares of life lived now in the land that they had long awaited?

“Turn again to God” the prophets warned the people of Israel, and they did not. Again and again God sent prophets to call them home, and punished Israel with battle and exile, and begged, pleaded and thundered, and still the people of Israel, the chosen people, did not return, did not repent.

And so Jerusalem was overcome and the Temple was destroyed, most of her people were carried into exile, and what was perhaps worse than all of that was the terrible silence which descended, and God no longer spoke to his people. Even when he fought with them and punished them, God was at least speaking to them, but now a silence has come down, and there are no words from God, there are no messengers and no prophets.

And the people of Israel are left waiting, in silence. Waiting is something that they are good at, something that they have learned to do through the long years of their interaction with God. They waited in Egypt and they waited in the wilderness; they waited for a king, and then they waited for a decent king. They waited to come back from Babylon and now they are waiting to see what happens with the Roman Empire.

They are getting good at waiting, or at least resigned to waiting. And what they wait is the savior who is promised again and again through all their interactions with God, the one that can restore Israel again.

All of that is there in the background, as Simeon stands there in the Temple, holding a forty day old child. Simeon is an image of disparate pieces at the very moment of intersection, the place between the longing and waiting of the people of Israel throughout the years, and the advent of God’s savior and messiah, at the moment when prophesy moves from possible to actual and dreams turn into reality. He stands there, right on the cusp of waiting being transformed into joy, and longing coming to satiety, desire to completeness.

So laden is the moment, so poignant the vision of God’s salvation in the frame of a tiny child that Simeon bursts into song. It matters not that death is near, for God’s savior is here, and he has held him in his arms.

It is a glorious image and symbol, an old man and an infant, a man who has lived in hope for God’s action, and a child whose potential will shake the foundations of the world. And Simeon, death near him, breaks out in a song of praise to the God who has been silent for so long, but is now working: “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation which though has prepared for all the world to see, a light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.”

And because he stands there, holding the savior of the world, an image and sign of God’s redemption, Simeon is a better answer to the questions about God’s silence and God’s absence, that constantly arise.

For those questions are constant from year to year and age to age. Where is God when his people are in bondage to a foreign empire? Where now is God in Haiti, where in Iraq? Why is God silent when the planet is being ravished, and millions live in abject poverty? Why is God absent when my life seems to be falling apart?

Simeon holding Jesus is far better than a theological or a philosophical answer to the question of God’s absence, in 1^st century Palestine, or quake-ravished Haiti. The answer to our questions is cradled in an old man’s arms. The tiny child offers no theological answer, no philosophical defense of God’s absence and silence. All that he offers is himself, a tiny frame, a wisp of hair, and miniature fist.

Simeon doesn’t claim that this is God’s messiah. He does nothing except hold the child, and praise God. Nothing need be said, for God’s absence and God’s silence is not undone by human words, but by the child who is the savior of the world: into the silence of the world a word has been spoken and the Logos has come down to be God with us.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

2 February 2010

The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple: Candlemas

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Never in my life have I owned or regularly driven a new car.  Among the other implications this condition may have for me, there is the fact that I am normally surrounded, when I drive at night, by cars with fabulously bright halogen headlights – or whatever else is now producing that bright, blue-tinted, Star Trek light that is beamed into my rearview mirror.

Of course, I do drive a car with that little switch on the bottom of the mirror, called, I am told by my Owner’s Manual, the “Day/Night” switch, which, the manual assures me, is there to “make driving more comfortable.  And indeed, it is vastly more comfortable to drive at night with the switch flipped (is it up or down?) so that the glare of those magnificent headlights you probably have on your car does not blind me.  With the switch flipped, as you know, the road behind me appears as a 10” by 2” rectangle of darkness, salted with white dots of light.  It may be more comfortable driving, but it is a limited perspective.

It is precisely this limited view that Saint Paul is describing when he writes in his most famous passage “for now we see in a mirror dimly,” or in the older version, “in a glass darkly.”  You all know this phrase – you have heard it read at weddings.  And there may be some value to assessing whether or not it matters if now we see only in a glass darkly.

Because if we do, we see only what is behind us, what is chasing us, or what is falling away from us, and even then we see it only dimly, its contours and shape obscured.  What we do not see, Saint Paul implies is the road ahead of us.

We are infatuated with the road behind us, receding into the darkness.  And we tend to lead our lives this way – with our eyes glued to the rearview mirror, in its “Night” position, fixated on what’s behind us, what’s already past.  We do not see our lives, as he says, “face to face.”  We do not see fully.   And so, we do not live life as God intends us to live.  And we have hardly a clue of the beauty and glory that lies ahead of us.
In his letter, which Paul thought he was writing to the Christians in Corinth, but we know he was really writing to us, Paul is suggesting what he calls, “ a still more excellent way” of seeing the world, and therefore living life.  Paul writes of what he knows.  For he had been an expert on the laws of Jewish faith, and he was a man of unswerving and unerring faith.  He knew the laws of Moses, lived by them, and he encouraged (shall we say) others to live by them too.  OK, let’s say he encouraged Jews to do so by force.
At no time in his life that we know of did Paul’s faith ever waver or fail.  Many of us know what it is like to live with uncertain or undeveloped or uninformed faith, but this was not Paul’s story.  Even his conversion from following the laws of Moses to following Jesus was not the result of a crisis of faith.  It was the result of a crisis of vision.  He was struck blind for several days, something like a fish’s scales obscuring his eyes, until they fell from his eyes and he found a new vision.  The view, when the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, was a different view of the world than he had ever seen.  And that view would not only change his life, it would change the world.

He saw that life was not made better, perfect, or holy by following the 613 commandments of Jewish law, the task he had devoted his life to.  He even saw that faith – which he had in bucketsful – was not all you needed to live a good life.  He saw that only one thing made the difference between looking at life through the rearview mirror with the Night switch on, and seeing the life that lies ahead of us in all its vibrant light and color.  And that one thing is love.

And so Paul wrote his famous love song, his ode, within his first letter to the Corinthians.  “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” Does it sound to you as though perhaps Paul is describing an earlier version of himself: impatient, unkind, envious, boastful, arrogant, and rude?
Love “does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  [Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”

Love is the vision of the road that stretches out before us when we stop seeing life through the rearview mirror, with the Night switch on; when we stop seeing life through a glass darkly.
And what Paul says, is that most of us have been trying to drive while looking only through the rearview mirror in the dark, with the Night switch on.  Have you ever tried to navigate your car this way?  Has it ever seemed to you that you were trying to navigate your life this way?

None of us here, that I know of, is constrained by an effort to live by the 613 commandments of the laws of Moses, but many of us, most of us, are living lives defined by a much narrower set of constrictions: the need to pay the bills, the need to get through the work day (just get through it); the struggle to find some joy in your time with your spouse; the difficulty in sleeping without pills (or even with them); the sense that you are missing out on life, that you gave up options because of choices you made long ago; the frustration that your children have not turned out the way you hoped they would.  All these are visions of life through a glass darkly: little spots of white zooming one way or another in a small rectangle of darkness.  No wonder faith seems like a struggle under the circumstances; it’s all we have to go on while trying move forward and seeing only the world behind us through a glass darkly.

But there is a road ahead of us.  And that road beckons us with love.  It calls us to be patient, kind, and humble.  The road of love invites us to yield to others, making way for them because, after all, there is room enough.  The road ahead is way-marked by good choices: choosing the right over the wrong, the truth over falsehood.  The road has challenges, to be sure, but there are no warnings that it cannot bear heavy loads: the road of love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

St. Paul did not write his love song to be read at weddings, and it is not a reflection on marital bliss.  It is meant to provide a different view, to jolt us into looking straight ahead and seeing what God has prepared for us.  And the thing is, that there is not some great test to be passed, there are no rules that must be followed, there are no hoops to be jumped through.  There is just this call to look and see.  There is the encouragement to rub our eyes vigorously if the scales have not fallen from them on their own.  There is the recognition to be made that we have been driving while looking through a glass darkly and seeing mostly only what is behind us.  There is this possibility of love, which is greater even than faith or hope, since both faith and hope are built on it.

It may be true that the road behind you has been dark.  It may be the case that it has seemed the best you could do is avoid a collision, keep the darting spots of light in the rearview mirror at bay, stay in your own lane, and maybe even slow down to prevent disaster.  But from the radio comes an old song that sounds familiar.  You have heard it before, but has it ever spoken to you?

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful
or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.

As the song plays, can you feel the tension in your neck relax, as you tear your eyes from the rearview mirror, and you begin to realize that you have been driving all night, but now the dawn has come, and the sun is rising, and a golden light shines on the road that leads ahead of you and stretches on and on, anywhere you can imagine or dream, and beyond that, too.

And there is no speed limit, no rules of the road even, because they are not necessary, no danger of being caught, because you are doing nothing wrong.  There is only this beautiful, smooth road before you, and an inexplicably gentle, cool breeze.  There is only love.  It is a view we had only dreamed about, but never seen before.  But it is real, and it is a more excellent way than any other on earth.  Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
31 January 2010
Saint Mark’s, Philadelphia


No story from the New Testament seems as ready-made for a laugh as the story of Jesus at the wedding of Cana.  The best of these laughs, I can tell you, normally come at the expense of the clergy.  A collar on your neck is a passport to a lifetime of being challenged to turn water into wine.  Behind the joke, I suspect, lurks the conviction of absurdity – the absurdity that Jesus ever actually turned six great stone jugs of water into wine, and the absurdity of ministry in his name, with the attendant absurdity that such ministry could change the world, let alone so much as a thimbleful of water into wine.

There is almost always something absurd in the suggestion that we can do anything that Jesus did.  That’s why the next best joke in the book is walking on water.  Most clergy are not so sure they want to walk on water, but would actually like to be able to turn water into wine, so there’s the rub.  So far, however, it is a trick that has eluded me – which comes as a disappointment, I am sure, not only to all of you but to many of my friends who do not go to church. 

Saint John tells us that Jesus performed this miracle as the first of a series of signs that began to reveal his identity, his glory, to those around him in Galilee.  Very well, there is no doubt that this episode is all about Jesus.  But the person who interests me in the story is actually his mother, Mary.  She is older now than the young girl who gave birth to that special baby.  She is middle-aged, I guess.  She has seen a thing or two.  Saint John leaves open for us the possibility that Mary and Jesus came to the wedding at Cana separately – Jesus was with his disciples, perhaps Mary was there with Joseph.  I’d like to think she and Joseph danced together.

It may be that when Mary comes up to Jesus, this is the first time they have spoken that day, maybe the first time in a while.  We normally take it for granted that Mary goes up to Jesus with intent, asking him to do something about the lack of wine.  But maybe it is more of a snarky comment, a sotto voce criticism of the bridal party or their parents, “Can you believe it, they have no wine!”

Whatever the case, Jesus does not take it well.  Had he and his mother been fighting recently?  Had she been pressuring him to spend more time at home?  Maybe pressuring him to find a bride of his own?  (There’s no time like a wedding to meet someone!)  Perhaps there is a backstory that explains his impatience with his mother, we don’t know.  But whatever her purpose was in first going over to her son, Mary now sees something, she sees it before Jesus does.  She sees that there is something for him to do, a miracle to be wrought, a sign to be shown. 

Left to his own devices, Jesus seems inclined to hang out with his disciples at the bachelors’ table and talk theology.  But Mary knows that there is more to be done.  It is Mary who orchestrates this miracle.  It is she who provokes Jesus about the wine in the first place, whatever her intent; it is she who puts up with his terse response.  And it is she who tells the servants to do whatever he tells them. 

Up until now, it did not appear that Jesus was going to tell them to do anything.  But Mary has opened the door, so to speak, and she does so, having picked her spot, right beside six large stone jars that are standing nearby.  No, Mary does no get the water or work the miracle of changing it into wine.  But if not for her, Jesus might not have done it either.

It is precisely because Jesus did not teach any of his disciples how to do the trick, and precisely because they do not teach you how to do it in seminary, that it makes sense for us to notice Mary in this well-known story.  Because if there is to be anything like a re-enactment this miracle in the world today, neither you nor I will ever get to be Jesus, and turn water into wine.  But we can be like Mary.  We need no special circumstances, not even a wedding reception, to orchestrate the context for Jesus’ miracles in the world today.

Every day of our lives brings an opportunity to provoke Jesus with our prayers – whether we have spoken with him recently or not, even if we’ve been angry with him.

Every day brings opportunities to see ways to show signs of Jesus’ glory – even ways that he might not have been looking for himself.

Every day brings opportunities to encourage others to do as Jesus instructs, and see, just see, if things don’t change.

Recently, the Fox News anchor, Brit Hume did just this, by opining about repentance and forgiveness in Jesus’ name on the air.  At the time, I was quite taken aback, mostly because I naturally recoil at the idea of anything meaningful, or sacred being discussed on Fox News, and because I find TV news in general an unlikely and inappropriate place for a journalist to express such views.

But the fact of the matter is that Christian faith does have a lot to say about the need for repentance and forgiveness, about transformation.   Whether or not Brit Hume chose the right time and place to say it, he was right that our faith makes claims about these things that other faiths do not. His mistake was to say the right thing at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

But you and I are not bound by the same restrictions that Brit Hume is, or ought to be bound by.  Yet we are so often as tongue-tied about our faith as we are confounded by the trick of turning water into wine.  We can have none of the confidence of Mary, if we lack even the conviction of Brit Hume.  And we live in a society that would prefer to make jokes about turning water into wine than to take seriously any suggestions about repentance and forgiveness, about the real possibility of transformation.

But at a wedding in Cana, Mary shows us that she not only made room for Jesus in her own life by saying yes to the angel Gabriel all those years ago, but that she helped others make room for him in their lives, by seeing that there is something for him to do, by provoking him in the way that only a mother can, and by positioning herself conveniently beside six stone jars.  This is a model for ministry that anyone can follow; we don’t need to be TV news anchors, in fact it’s better that we are not.

A few days ago I learned that a young man I know happened to be in Haiti on a missionary trip with his church when the devastating earthquake hit the island.  I’d had no idea the young man, who is a National Guardsman in the First City Troop that I serve as a chaplain, was in any way inclined to make such a journey to do missionary work, and I was impressed to discover this, even as I worried for his safety.

Missionary work – going out to care for the poor and those in need – is almost always an occasion to follow Mary’s model, almost always a way of standing by six stone jars, knowing that if you can get them filled, Jesus will do something wonderful with them.  Think of this parish’s mission trips to Mississippi after Katrina, to Honduras to run a medical clinic, and to our mission parish of Saint James the Less in North Philadelphia to run City Camp, and, we pray, to open a school there.

Mercifully, it did not take too long for word to reach his family and others that my young friend and his group were OK.  But of course the mere thought of Haiti at this time, five days after the quake, is a reminder of the need for a real miracle of transformation.  We are already seeing what a gift any amount of water could be in the context of such suffering; how six stone jars full could become so much more than they appear to be.

And since you and I cannot go there and fill jars of water ourselves, we can at least help to pay for it.  We can let our contributions to a special collection we will take up this week and next serve as our conviction that Jesus, using the hearts and hands and contributions of thousands of people can and will work miracles in that poverty-ridden country; that hope is not gone.

Let us use our prayers to provoke Jesus, as if he needs it.  Forget the wine, they have no water!  Let us find ways to encourage and support those in positions to help to do all they can.  And let us find the stone jars that need to be filled.  In this case it would appear that our own collection plates will do nicely.

We live in a world that remains desperately in need of the transforming miracles of Jesus.  Haiti is simply the most obvious example of that need at the moment.  But it may help us to see why we cannot take Jesus’ power for granted; why it is no joke that Jesus can change things: water into wine, despair into hope; suffering into survival; and an island of death, we pray, into a place of new life.

And you and I and every Christian person has a ministry, modeled by Mary, to be a part of this transformation.  We have always to bring our prayers to Jesus.  We have always to pave the way for him, to share with others the great joy to be had in doing as he instructs us.  And we have always to find the stone jars that can be filled with water and turned into wine.  Sometimes it will be enough for us to locate the jars.  Sometimes we will have to fill them ourselves.  But always, always, the miracle is wrought by Jesus.

Can we believe that this is no joke?  Can we have confidence that Jesus will work wonders in our lives and in the world?  Or does it seem absurd to us, as it does to so much of the world?

The world I see – from the destruction in Haiti to the landscape of my own life – is a world that depends on the merciful power of a loving God to change things from the way they are to the way they can be.

We cannot possibly find the stone jars fast enough, we cannot possibly fill them with too much water, and we cannot possibly hope for something better than that Jesus will take the stone jars we manage to have filled, and change our water into wine, our despair into hope, change the way things are into the way things can be, change our death into life.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
17 January 2010
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia