Trading Places

The 1700 block of Locust Street - just a block away from us - has long been remembered as the film location of the exterior of the fictional “Heritage Club” in the opening scenes of the 1983 movie “Trading Places.”  The main building of the Curtis Institute of Music provided the facade for the snooty men’s club.  If I have the plot right, it involves a bet made by two aging, patrician brothers, Randolph and Mortimer, who want to engineer a swap in social status of young investment banker from their own family firm, played by Dan Aykroyd, and a homeless man played by Eddie Murphy.  The bet is to see whether the enterprising, black, homeless guy can be coached to pass as a cultured business executive, and I guess to see how the privileged white guy handles the privations of the street.  It’s “Pygmalion” meets “The Prince and the Pauper.”

In one early scene, the two elderly brothers, Randolph and Mortimer, are talking about their plan.  Randolph is musing about all they’ll learn about human nature.  But Mortimer is preoccupied with a business deal that’s somehow involved in all this.  Randolph chides his brother, “Money isn’t everything, Mortimer,” he says.

Comes the reply, “Oh, grow up.”

Randolph continues, “Mother always said you were greedy.”

To which his brother answers with smug satisfaction, “She meant it as a compliment.”*

The joke is on Randolph, as long as he pretends to believe that money isn’t everything.  But, of course, he doesn’t really believe that.  And the joke is really on anyone who does.

At the end of the film, the characters played by Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy both get rich, while Randolph and Mortimer lose their shirts in the market.  So the joke’s on them.  But as social commentary, the film doesn’t deliver much punch, since getting rich seems to be its own reward.

Getting rich continues to be its own reward in America.  The top 10% of Americans own about 70% of the wealth of this nation, while the bottom 50% of Americans together own about 2.5% of the wealth here.**  If this is the land of opportunity, you can sort of do the math to figure out who the joke is on, can’t you?  Of course, we’ve learned a lot about who the joke is on, in the past few years.  The joke is on you if you pay your taxes, apparently.  The joke is on you if you think the rule of law applies to everyone without fear or favor.  The joke is on you if you believe in the sacrifice of service to a cause greater than your own enrichment.  Mother always said you were greedy… but she meant it as a compliment.  Ask not who the joke is on: the joke’s on you.

Enter Lazarus:  a poor man, “covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.”  Lazarus “died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.”  And the rich man, outside whose gate Lazarus used to beg, also died.  And he was sent to Hades, to the place of torment, agony, and flames.

It doesn’t take a seminary degree to see who the joke’s on here.  As is the case in so much of Jesus’ teaching about money and wealth, the joke’s on you if you think wealth will bring you happiness or blessing from the hand of God.  Oh, you might enjoy it while it lasts, but it will not last.  And there is a book on the desk of St Peter.  And in that book there may be a series of intricate marking that tells St. Peter if you have ever turned away from the thing you needed to turn away from, if you have sought forgiveness, and offered it, if you have worked for peace in the midst of war, if you have chosen to give when everyone else was taking, and if you have lived your life, despite evidence to the contrary, as though the only two kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain.  But there is probably not an account in that book of how much money you had - at least not on the plus side of the ledger.  “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.”  Mother always said you were greedy, so who’s the joke on now?

The parable of Lazarus and the rich man is a cautionary tale.  As such, the parable seems to provide a means of predicting who will go to heaven and who will go to hell.  But reading the parable as such a predictor will do almost no one any good.  The rich are quite immune to threats that their wealth can do them any harm in this life or the next.  Jesus may not have been too interested providing a system of predictions for the life to come.  Jesus may have been more interested in influencing the way his followers lived their lives while they breathed in this world.  And Jesus was definitely interested in bringing good news to the poor.

For the church, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man is of poignant interest when we ask ourselves where in it is there good news to be found?  The modern Episcopalian might find this question a bit of a challenge.  I certainly do.  The good news of this parable seems elusive to me at first reading because of all the Lazaruses I encounter every day, sometimes literally at the gates of this church, but certainly in great number in close proximity to here.  And whenever I see a Lazarus, it becomes very clear to me who I am, according to the logic of the parable.  And it seems clear to me that the joke is on me.

Notice how, in the parable, the normal arrangement of things is reversed: the poor, homeless guy has a name and an identity: he is Lazarus!  But the rich guy is nameless, generic, unknown, perhaps even forgotten by his five brothers after he died, for all I know.  The specificity and clarity of Lazarus’s identity is an indicator of where the good news in the parable is to be found.  Of course, there’s good news for Lazarus!  There’s good news for the poor, the suffering, for the one who goes without.  And that poor man is known by name: beloved of Abraham, and expected in the warm embrace of his bosom!  But the rich man could be almost anyone who fits the description.  The tradition has turned the Latin word “dives,” which means “wealthy, opulent, moneyed, ample” into the rich man’s proper name, since we can almost not bear to think that he should be nameless and obscure.  Mother always said you were greedy… but she meant it as a compliment.  But the parable makes it very clear that, in the end, the joke’s on Mother, and the joke’s on you if you are anyone other than Lazarus.

The parable of Lazarus and the rich man is a cautionary tale for the church, since the church is where we are meant to be reminded of who we really are, who God made us to be.  And a church which is empty of the poor and untroubled by the plight and suffering of the poor is a church that is more or less condemned; it’s a church without any real saints; and its members haven’t much hope of enjoying the blessings to be found in the heavenly bosom of Abraham.

The legacy of Saint Mark’s in this regard is complicated.  All around us we have reminders that once upon a time we were a very rich church, and we rather enjoy those reminders - I certainly do.  But we also know that for much of this parish’s history, since long before we were given a silver altar, we have taken the parable of Lazarus and the rich man seriously, making sure that this parish’s ministry has been meaningfully, and intentionally, and demandingly inclusive of the poor and aimed toward alleviating the needs of the poor.

It’s very important that at Saint Mark’s we have not been content to allow our space to be used by some other organization that accomplishes that work for us, without ever sullying our own hands or tiring our own selves out.  Our ministries to those in need are the actual work of this parish and its people, and they are run by you: by members and staff of this parish.  And if you are not involved in one of those ministries - if you have not made soup for the Soup Bowl or served it, or if you have not volunteered at the Food Cupboard, or helped deliver food to the Church of the Crucifixion, or volunteered at St. James School - well, maybe you should try it?

Because there is good news to be had, and Jesus wants us all to be the inheritors of his good news, his great blessings, his promise, his hope, his new and happy and abundant life!  And how we live in this life matters.  What we do for one another matters.  How we treat those who have less than we have and less than they need matters.

Mother always said you were greedy, but she meant it as a compliment.  But if in the end we’ll be trading places with those who we failed to care for, failed to help, failed to treat as a brother or a sister, as Lazarus and the rich man traded places… well, that’s no joke.  And what hope do we have if we failed to listen to Moses and the prophets, neither were we convinced by Jesus rising from the dead?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
25 September 2022
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia

*”Trading Places” screenplay by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod

**figures for 2021, according to the Council on Foreign Relations

Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in “Trading Places”

A Parable from the Borderlands

Sermon Notes from September 18th

Society is destabilized. Mechanisms of power and governance are ripe with corruption. Every dependable dimension of social and political order heretofore considered unshakable has been undermined. Religious participation is shifting and in decline, and violence seems to thrive in every city. I speak, of course, about Rome, in the years that followed its sack by the Visigoths in the year 410 AD. 

When Rome fell, a pernicious rumor emerged. It was said that the destruction of such a mighty empire was vengeance - retribution from the Roman Gods for the shift away from pagan loyalty and toward the practice of Christianity. This was embraced by the exiled pagan elite: surely, indeed, this was the Christians’ fault. Christians themselves began to wonder if this was true. But just as light extends outward to fill the farthest shadows of a room, the saints of God have a way of illuminating times of spiritual darkness, and this was true of Saint Augustine of Hippo. By this time in the early 5th century, Augustine was a bishop and quite a well-regarded scholar, but he remained - first and foremost - a pastor. He was keenly aware of the suffering of his flock, and as travel was difficult between cities, he wrote to them. 

If you pick up Augustine’s City of God today, you’ll have to stretch your hand around over 500 pages -more, if you’ve got a copy with a good appendix. It is a work of theology, to be sure, but at its heart, it is a pastoral letter. Christians, Augustine wrote, did not need to worry that the sack of Rome or the destruction of any other place meant anything about their worthiness or their faith. Earthly cities might grow and die around them, but Christians reside in another city all together. Even on earth - in these mortal years of life - they could become full citizens of the City of God.

The distinction between the two cities is simple enough. The earthly city is built upon love for the self. The heavenly city is built on the love of God. In the earthly city, power and corruption spread freely, wealth and superiority are prized above all else, and success depends on dominance and violence. In the City of God, the humble are exalted. Truth, beauty, peace, and grace draw people together in their songs to the Almighty. It is a city ripe with thanksgiving and fully alive with praise. 

But this question of citizenship isn’t always as easy as we might like to think it is. Even Augustine knew that there were borderlands. We might like to think we belong in the City of God, but it doesn’t take much reflection for me personally to be quickly reminded of all the times I’ve chosen not to live there. We want to think of the earthly city as an evil place we’d quickly pass on by. We’d like to think that the heavenly city is the only homeland we need. But most of us are intimately familiar with the borderlands: the places where we can see the light ahead but still cling to a shadow or two to cover the parts of ourselves we’d rather no other could see. 

I share this bit of history class with all of you, because it has been a helpful lens for me in thinking through the strange parable of the dishonest steward that we find today in the Gospel of St. Luke. It occurs to me that this is a borderland parable. In the Bible, the parables of Jesus always teach us something about the kingdom of God. They reveal something about God himself. And while they may seem to be simple, the parables of Jesus are all windows into the mighty work of salvation. In many of the famous parables, we encounter a decently clear portrait of the nature of God. The parable of the “prodigal son” comes just before this one. The father in that story is merciful, embracing his younger son even after the son has disgraced him. God is merciful. God’s love is abundant. I like this one. 

But this parable of the dishonest - sometimes called the “unjust” - manager is very odd. If we were to follow our instincts here, it would seem that the rich man - when he found out about his manager’s dishonesty - it would seem that he would be angered by being cheated. But he commends the manager for acting shrewdly. Does this mean that God endorses shady business dealings? Jesus’ explanation of the story is odd too, but it draws our attention toward the key to the parable. The rich man sees that the manager has recognized that something is more important than money: relationships. Charity. Interdependence with others. Yes- all of these things were prioritized for selfish gain, but something good emerges here from something wicked. 

This is still very tricky to think through. Biblical scholars and commentators have struggled with this parable for centuries, and so if you are too, you are in very good company. But we can see here that Jesus is telling us something important about the ways of God. God’s economy is not our economy. God’s riches are not what earthly cities prize. In the great outworking of sanctification, even these odd stories of the borderlands can draw us closer to the City of God. 

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 11, Jesus says to a crowd: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” This sounds very like Jesus talking about the children of this age acting shrewdly. While the children of this age might be in the borderlands, they are - whether they know it or not - participating in God’s economy. If we who are evil still know how to give good gifts to our children, just imagine how much more wonderful still are the ways of God. 

This parable is a parable of the borderlands between the earthly city and the heavenly one. This is a parable from the place where most of us live most of the time. And while it may seem strange and a bit ominous, it is filled with good news. Jesus encourages us here: if we are faithful in little things, we can become faithful in big ones. If we find grace even in the midst of chaos and corruption, we are attuning our hearts to be receivers of the grace that never stops searching us out. If we start to recognize truth, beauty, and goodness in the hidden places of the earthly city, we start to strengthen ourselves for the journey through the borderlands and ever closer to the place where Jesus calls us home. 

This was the stunning project of Augustine’s writing: he wrote to show that the heavenly city was never separate from or away from or above or beyond the earthly city at all. It has always been right here in the midst of things. God has always been breaking open the closed places and pouring in fresh air, fresh light. He is always planting seeds where nothing should grow. God walks out into the borderlands to find us - meeting us precisely where we are and reminding us, as often as we need to hear it, that we are beloved. Holiness is always in the midst of us.

And so we receive a dispatch from the borderlands: a message of bizarre hope and radical redemption. Jesus is not endorsing shady business deals. He is revealing the magnitude of God’s power to call salvation even from what looks like death. 

Preached by Mother Brit Frazier

18 September 2022

Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

There Will Be Joy In Heaven

A cartoon in this week’s New Yorker shows us St. Peter standing at a podium before the gates of heaven. He has a quill pen in his hand, and he is consulting a book.  Behind him, at either side of the gates, are sentry boxes manned by foot-soldiers from one of the regiments of the Household Division that guards the British monarch; they are dressed in their red tunics and bearskin helmets, with bayoneted weapons at their sides.

Much though there is to consider here on earth these days, today draws our minds to heaven as we contemplate death.  Not only are we still processing the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the grief of the English nation; we are gathered here on the anniversary of our own national grief - a day the New Yorker memorialized at the time with an image made in shades of black ink on black ink, which seemed to say almost everything that could be said about how we felt that day twenty-one years ago today.  Those feelings return easily when we think about that awful day, don’t they?

Part of the church’s ministry is to not look away from death, but to confront it, to be honest about it, and to try to grasp the truth about death that God has shown us through the gift of his Son Jesus, whose death was the turning point in the divine enterprise, where death was concerned.  It was Jesus’ death that began the process by which, as the old hymn puts it, “he closed the yawning gates of hell; the bars from heaven’s high portals fell.”

There are no bars holding shut the golden gates in the New Yorker cartoon by Brooke Bourgeois, which bear only the slightest resemblance to the gates of Buckingham Palace.  They are not locked tight.  You can perceive a gap between the two gates, and you can see that they are ajar.   It could be that they are just beginning to open, or that they are almost finished closing.  But they are not locked shut.

Heavenly gates are mostly the subject of cartoons these days, since not so many people believe in them or worry about them as used to be the case.  But with death so much on our minds, we might wonder about them.  And if we do wonder about the gates of heaven, I suppose the question is: Who will be allowed through?  Or, more specifically: Will you or I be allowed through?  When  life on earth has ended, is there a life in heaven that awaits us, and if there is, will we be allowed in?  Who can get past the gates of heaven, and enter into the presence of the Lord?

The Gospel reading assigned for today offers us a hint to the answer to that question, even though, at first glance, it does not appear to have much to do with death.  Jesus concludes the parable of the lost sheep with the assertion that “there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”  I don’t know who those ninety-nine righteous persons might be.  I don’t think I have ever met them.  But I have known some lost sheep; I have been lost myself.  And if there’s joy in heaven over the repentance of a sinner, I suppose God might be keeping track of the repentance of us sinners here on earth.  Maybe that’s why in the cartoon, St. Peter is consulting a book.  I know it’s childish and naive to think of heaven and our relationship with God this way.  But sometimes our religious and theological insights are childish and naive.

Childishly, we tend to think that the better we are - by which I guess we mean the more perfect, more holy, more pure we are - the better our chances of getting  into heaven will be.  But this calculus - that heaven is a reward for the righteous - has never been very appealing, and it is based on a faulty premise; that the better you are, the more God loves you.

I’m reminded of an insight that I heard expressed years ago from this pulpit, and that it’s been valuable to repeat from time to time.  It came in the context of challenging the notion that God will love you if you are good enough.  If that’s the case, then we might live our lives haunted by the question: How good do we have to be?  And this is a problematic question, because there isn’t really an answer to it.  But here’s the insight that I heard from this pulpit years ago: God doesn’t love us because we are good enough.  God loves us because we are weak and stupid.*

God loves us because we are weak and stupid.  Not despite the fact that we are weak and stupid, but God love us because of it.  Of course, we are also marvelously made in the very image and likeness of God.  So, please don’t hear this insight as an attack on your self-esteem.  But it’s partly because we humans are so stupendous in our accomplishments and abilities that it is useful to remember, from time to time, that we are also weak and stupid.  And I’ll say it again, God does not love us despite who we are; God loves us because of who we are, because he knows how much we need his love.  We heard Moses reminding God of this very aspect of divine love when he convinced God to “turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind, and do not bring disaster on your people.”  Moses might just as well have reminded God that we humans are weak and stupid, but that God made a covenant of love with us anyway.

In the Gospel today, we heard the Pharisees and the scribes grumbling about Jesus because he welcomed sinners and ate with them.  That is to say that Jesus made fellowship with people who were not good enough for God’s love, as far as the Pharisees and the scribes were concerned: sinners who should be left in the hands of an angry God.  The Pharisees and the scribes are depicted in the Gospels as hypocritically holier-than-thou, quite in contrast to Jesus and his followers.  But, of course, today it’s us followers of Jesus who are often regarded as hypocritically holier-than-thou.  We still have much to learn from Jesus.

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices.”  God loves us because we are lost, and God rejoices when we get found.  There is joy in heaven over every sinner who repents.  And repentance is the choice to turn around and do things differently: the decision to seek forgiveness and to offer it, the will to work for peace while everyone around you is waging war, the conviction that you should give when all you have ever been taught to do is take, the possibility of living your life as though there are only two kinds of people in the world: good people and good people in pain.

Today, death seems close at hand as we remember the victims of 9/11, as we hear the muffled bells tolling across the British Isles, as we think of those whom we love who have died, or who are near to death.  I could name names of the deaths that seem close at hand, and so could you.  And still we wonder: Who can get past the gates of heaven, and enter into the presence of the Lord?

Who knows whether or not there really are gates at the entryway to heaven?  I prefer to hope that heaven is not actually a gated community.  But the image of the gates of heaven helps us to consider that there is a way in to heaven, just as it helps us to consider that there might be ways to be kept out of heaven.  And the way we live our lives might have something to do with it.

In the parable of the lost sheep, Jesus teaches us that the question was never really, How good do we have to be?  The question was never really about how perfect, holy, and pure we could be, since we could never be perfect enough, holy enough, or pure enough; no one can be.  The only question, really, is whether we repent: whether we have tried to turn away from our own mistakes, and to do the best we can to amend the things and the people we hurt when we were being weak and stupid.

Maybe there are gates at the entryway to heaven.  If there are, then everything I believe about God suggests to me that there are no bars across those gates, they are not locked shut, rather, they are still ajar.  And whatever guards might be standing there will be, I hope, only for show.  And the book that rests on the desk before St. Peter is not, I think, a book in which are recorded the details of just how good or bad you have been, whether you are a queen or a commoner.  The book includes your name, the name by which God himself knows you, and perhaps some intricate marking that tells St. Peter if you have ever turned away from the thing you needed to turn away from, if you have sought forgiveness, and offered it, if you have worked for peace in the midst of war, if you have chosen to give when everyone else was taking, and if you have lived your life, despite evidence to the contrary, as though the only two kinds of people in the world are good people and good people in pain.

That’s repentance.  It’s what leads us out of an existence that is drawn in shades of black ink on black ink, and leads us toward the golden gates of heaven that have been unlocked and still stand open and ready to welcome the likes of you and me, for whom the angels of God are ready and waiting to rejoice!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
11 September 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

*This insight came from Fr. Nicholas Stebbing, CR, in a sermon preached at Saint Mark’s

St. Peter preapres for a royal audience by Brook Bourgeois, in the New Yorker, 12 Septemeber 2022 issue