The Rules

If you are short, the taller people will stand in front of you. First come, first served, I guess, or maybe the taller people actively shove their way to the front of the crowd. What’s clear—rule number one—is that no one will volunteer to let you stand in front, even if they would still be able to see right over your head.

Rule number two: never ask for help. If you are too short to see, don’t acknowledge that. Just sneak up a tree. Of course you are shockingly visible once you climb that tree. You will stand out like a sore thumb. You’ll be hidden in plain sight, over-compensating for what you can’t acknowledge, and everyone will know what you are doing. But no one will talk about it, because that conversation will expose them as much as it exposes you. You will bear not only the pain of exclusion but the pain of being a visible sign of the community’s rejection of you. Which no one wants to face. Not you, not them.

The third rule is that it’s ok to gawk at Jesus but you should never engage him directly. Don’t follow him. Just watch as he goes by. Don’t look around the crowd, either, or you’ll see the people who climb trees because no one will help them see. Jesus might want you to do something about that. Resist that inclination. It would require you to break ranks with the tall people and expose yourself to the same kind of stigma as the man in the tree. That’s too awkward.

Another rule: whatever you have done wrong in this community will stay with you forever. If you are a tax collector who is in the process of undergoing conversion, there will be no encouragement provided. On the contrary, each new stage of your relationship with Jesus will be met with gossip and frank disbelief. Who do you think you are?

We are up to rule five, now. If you are Jesus himself and you move among the people to heal and reconcile, you will be rejected outright for associating with people who need healing and reconciliation. Who does he think he is?

Rule six is that Jesus too must be hidden in plain sight. He is a big spectacle, but he should be kept at arm’s length. Whatever disturbance he creates in the crowd, the crowd needs to get ahead of him and neutralize him somehow. If you wonder why he is going to eat dinner in the home of an outcast, for example, just act as though you know it’s a sign of weakness on his part. Always have a cynical explanation for the actions of God, especially in the life of someone else.

Rule without a number: this community will never help you see Jesus. Spend any time at all in this crowd and you will know that. You can’t get close to Jesus playing by these rules. You can’t get there from here.

But look, that’s the exact rule that Jesus breaks, that rule behind all the rules. There is Zacchaeus up in the tree, and Jesus sees him. Jesus speaks his name. It turns out that the tax collector doesn’t have to get to Jesus or prop himself up to see Jesus. He doesn’t have to climb a tree. Jesus sees him. Jesus is coming to him. Jesus is the hungry one, the one in need of hospitality. 

And Zacchaeus, the one perched awkwardly on the edge of the community, is going to become the host. 

Let’s think about the gathering Zacchaeus hosts in this story, at the instigation of Jesus. You exist in that group, people look at you and listen to you while you sit together and share food. Zacchaeus tells the story of his own transformation in that room. He talks about how he was a cheater, and about how he held back money he knew others needed. We are way past worrying about being short, here. Zacchaeus breaks the rules energetically, just like Jesus did. 

Sharing food at this dinner party, and sharing stories of encounters with God—look, that’s what we do here at our best. We gather for word and sacrament, set free because Jesus told us he just had to be with us. Somehow, out of that ugly crowd, Jesus makes the church.

There isn’t a one of us who understands how Jesus works. We have no advantage over the crowd that shunned Zacchaeus, except that through his own urgency Jesus has seen us and let us know that he needs us to host a different kind of gathering. He has seen us up in our perches on the margins, overcompensating for what we can’t admit. I think he has been watching the news in this election cycle. He has seen our contortions and our scheming. He knows that when he calls to Zacchaeus he is reaching everyone in that crowd, everyone pretending there is no problem. All of us who reject others because of our own shame and fear. All of us. All of us staring at Jesus from a distance. All of us hungry.

Inexplicably, Jesus looks at that stifling, anxious crowd and just has to have dinner with them. “Hurry down,” he tells Zacchaeus, “I’ve got to come to your house.”  I’d want to get as far from those people as I possibly could. Wouldn’t you?

Are you new here today? Is this your first time in church in a long while, or ever? Are you tuning in online? Do you have questions about who we are? Because I think I can promise you: we’re lost. All we know is that somehow Jesus wants to gather us together as the lost ones. He wants to honor us with his presence. We are just the ones he wants to host. 

Mostly, we are less dramatic than Zacchaeus, less visible as lost and less public about being found. We don’t change all in one day. We go back and forth, sometimes staring at Jesus from a distance and sometimes sitting joyfully with him in word and sacrament. Sometimes we crowd you out. Sometimes we are just too busy contorting ourselves, climbing way out on a limb in the futile hope that no one will notice our pain.

But somehow Jesus breaks the rules that distort our community, breaks them joyfully and turns us around. Somehow we, hapless and in the throes of a true global crisis, are finding in Jesus the reason to do it differently. Don’t believe that we are different? Join us any Saturday morning for hospitality with our hungry neighbors. We don’t understand fully, but we feel it: Jesus is among the hungry and he has given us bread to share. 

Join us at 9:30 any Saturday for the Sacrament of Confession, in which we joyfully recite our sins and ask for the courage to change. Join us next Sunday, where, improbably, in an event we call “Commitment Sunday,” we celebrate giving our money away. We don’t understand it but we feel it: Jesus is among us and he has made it possible for us to let go.

We don’t stop being lost all in one day. We don’t forget the rules of the world we live in just like that. But day after day, week after week, Jesus tells us that he longs for us to host that cosmic banquet in which the bread of life gets shared and the word of God gets spoken. He wants that bread to be in our hands, held out to others. He wants that word to be spoken on our lips. We want that too, more than anything. 

It may not be easy for us, but I promise you, bit by bit, person by person, timidly and boldly, we are climbing down from our trees. If you are here, you are climbing down. And we say to you, with Jesus, “Hurry.”

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
October 20, 2022
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

D.E.I. in the Early Church

Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water,  it starts to look as though someone in the Bible thinks that there are only two kinds of people in the world.  We hear it is in the first Psalm today, which compares two kinds of people: there are those “who have not walked in the way of the wicked,” who are “like trees planted by streams of water; and then there are “the wicked,” who are “like chaff which the wind blows away.”  Two kinds of people.

Jesus gives us a hint of it in the passage from Matthew’s gospel where he says that “prophets are not without honor except in their own country.”  St. Matthew explains that there are places where people believe, and places where the people’s unbelief prevents Jesus from accomplishing anything much.  Two kinds of places;  two kinds of people.

But it is in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles where we encounter what is actually the tail end of the account of what had been a major concern and preoccupation of the early church, namely, whether there might only be two kinds of people in the world: people who keep the Jewish law and people who don’t keep the Jewish law.  Two kinds of people.

And since Jesus was a Jew who taught and ministered amongst his own people in their own lands, the question was pressing: do those who want to follow Jesus have to follow the Jewish law - especially men, who would then be required to be circumcised?  It was a sensitive subject.

So, you see, it is not simply a homiletic trope of mine; it is actually a matter that has been a carefully considered question in the church’s early history: are there only two kinds of people in the world?  Ever since I got on this trope, over the summer (since it does seem to be an implied assumption throughout so many scriptural texts), the world around me has tended to lean in to the possibility that there really are only two kinds of people in it: left and right, good and bad, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, with me or against me, Jew and Gentile, orthodox and devil-may-care.  The list could go on.

In Jerusalem, the question had been brewing for a little while, since, for Jews, the law (Torah) is everything, or nearly everything.  Both Peter and Paul, two out of three of the principal leaders of the early church, seem to have concluded fairly early on that they did not think it was necessary for Gentile men to be circumcised in order to become followers of the way.  This was a bold position to take, since circumcision was the sign of the covenant, and the covenant between God and God’s people was what the Torah was all about.  And not everyone was so easily convinced that circumcision should not be required for those who followed the teachings of a man who’d been called “rabbi,” after all.  What would it mean if God’s people abandoned this sign of the covenant?  Wouldn’t it mean that they were also abandoning the covenant, if they were abandoning the sign of the covenant?  Wouldn’t it mean they were abandoning God?

St. Paul never wavered in his conviction about this matter.  He himself, suspected that St. Peter had his doubts.  There was much anxiety about the question among the first Christian Jews, who couldn’t say for sure that they were one or the other; couldn’t claim with conviction to be one or another of two kinds of people in the world.

This kind of religious anxiety has not gone away in our own time, though it tends to present itself in much less theologically central matters, like: human sexuality, the filioque clause, law or grace, the inerrancy of scripture, etc., etc.  Even these days, we keep finding ways to wonder if maybe there really are only two kinds of people in the world.  Of course, the dirty little secret of this life-hermeneutic (this way of seeing the world through a particular lens) is that it is not ever really concerned with two kinds of people.  The suggestion that there are only two kinds of people in the world is usually intended to make the point that there ought to be only one kind of person in the world: our kind of person.

Oh, how tempting it must have been for the leaders of the early church to make just that argument: that there was only one kind of person in the world whom God loves, and we know just what such a person looks like.  What had been revealed to those first apostles, after all, was that God was establishing a new covenant of love through the Blood of Christ, shed on the Cross.  And if there was a new covenant, maybe that meant there needed to be new dividing lines, new boundaries, to determine who exactly the two kinds of people in the world were… so you could also know what the one, right kind of person was?

But in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, St. James of Jerusalem - who is sometimes called St. James the Just, or St. James the brother of Jesus, and who may or may not be the same person as St. James the Apostle, and who assuredly is not the same person as St. James the Less, and who was the third of the three principal leaders of the early church - in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, it is reported that St. James of Jerusalem, in a council gathered for this purpose - to decide if there really only are two kinds of people in the world, and if so, which kind is the one, right kind of person - declared for all the early church to hear that there is not just one kind of person on whom God looks favorably.  Quoting the prophet Amos, he reminds his brothers and sisters that God had brought his people back from exile and to return to Jerusalem: “from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord.”

If you don’t know what’s going on, you almost can’t tell what’s happened in the account we heard from Acts 15 today.  If you don’t kind of already know about the controversy, angst, and anxiety that had led to this point, it doesn’t sound momentous when St. James says, “I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God…. “  But what St. James means is that he has decreed that there are not only two kinds of people in the world.  Yes, St. James delivered a kind of compromise - that new followers should “abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood.”  But in effect, he was declaring that as far as he was concerned there are a whole lot of different kinds of people in the world, and God seemed to look favorably on a bunch of them.

This was the decision of those old-fashioned, out-moded, less-well-educated, and surely less sophisticated Christian men, all those centuries ago: that there’s more than two kinds of people in the world, and that God looks favorably on more of them than we can account for!

I’m not going to belabor the point.  But I am going to say what good news this is in a world that sometimes seems eager to assert that there are only two kinds of people in it.  There in Jerusalem, the apostles of our faith had to decide if the culture of our faith - which is decidedly monotheistic - should also be monochromatic, mono-cultural, and monolithic.  But with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they discerned that the church should be diverse, inclusive, and multi-cultural, like the world they already lived in.

It may be, as the Psalmist says, that “the Lord knows the way of the righteous; but the way of the wicked is doomed.”  It does not go without saying, however, that there are only two kinds of people in the world, and that only one of them is the right kind of people.  Such thinking is inauthentic to the church, who has understood from our earliest days that we are being called to believe in one God in the midst of a diverse, inclusive, and multi-cultural world.  This recognition is a matter of rejoicing for the church, since it means that the Gospel need not know any bounds; and that the promises of God can actually be shaped (in some measure) to fit the reality of the people to whom those promises are being declared, and that the people don’t need to be shaped (literally or figuratively) to fit the promises of God.  Of course, all people of faith need to be formed in our faith.  But the fact remains that the church has tended to err when she has insisted too much on shaping the hearers to fit the Gospel, rather than the other way round.

For us, today, we might consider the possibility that whenever we start to insist that there could be only two kinds of people in the world, and especially if we draw the lines along boundaries defined by, say, human sexuality, or the filioque clause, or the choice between law and grace, or the supposed inerrancy of scripture, etc., etc., then we are going down a path that the apostles discerned it was unwise to follow.

We don’t celebrate the life and witness of St. James of Jerusalem, because he was the church’s first DEI officer.  But we do celebrate his life and ministry because he was the first to articulate definitively the wisdom that there are not only two kinds of people in the world; and that the church is called to be diverse, inclusive, and multi-cultural, which is the only kind of church that can responsibly and faithfully and lovingly carry the Gospel of Jesus into every corner of the world,  so that, in the words of the poet, we can "let all the world in every corner sing, ‘My God and king!’”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of St. James of Jerusalem, 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

a 13th century Italian stone carving of Saints James, Paul, and Peter from the Victoria & Albert Museum

In Memoriam: Audrey Evans

It would not bother Audrey, I think, to know that we are making a fuss over her.

Jennifer has already mentioned the lambing season of 1986 - the first year of many that Audrey helped deliver lambs on the farm at Scotsburn.  It’s because those lambing experiences meant so much to her, seem to say so much about her, that the reading from John’s Gospel seemed so right for today.  It’s a little problematic that Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.”  I have this feeling that if Audrey is listening, she is thinking, “No, I am the good shepherd.”  This disagreement will cause some friction between her and her savior, but they’ll work it out.

Jesus used the image of the sheep and shepherd to teach about God’s love; about what God is like, and about what the world is like.

In her reminiscence about the ‘86 lambing season Audrey pointed out that ewes only need assistance in delivering their lambs about 20% of the time.  Of course, Audrey already knew that God’s creation, and God’s creatures are beautiful, but also imperfect.  She knew that God puts us - even the most vulnerable of us, even the littlest lambs - into situations that require intervention, assistance, and care.  And she knew that the reality of all this imperfection is not fair.  I guess another way to say that is that she knew that life is not fair.

So, yes, Audrey knew that that life is not fair, that God does not seem to be fair.  But Audrey also knew that God is love and that love is not fair.  Love is not measured, balanced, or just.  Audrey knew that too, and she had far more than her fair share of love to go around.  The vast and deep web of her relationships that Audrey developed is a testimony to the way she lived her life loving people.

One expression of that love was the fearlessness and faith with which she talked about death, especially to children.  If you haven’t heard about a time that Audrey talked to a child about heaven and what awaits us on the other side of death, then you might not have been listening very closely.

“Will there be flowers there?” one of her patients asked her.

“Of course there will be flowers there!” she said with assurance.  Of course there will be flowers there.

Audrey’s faith, which was real and deep, but also quite straightforward, gave her an assurance of God’s goodness that she was eager to share, and that left her unafraid of many challenges that frighten the rest of us - like death.

The great African American theologian Howard Thurman once told a story that puts me in mind of Audrey.  One night in what must have been 1910, when Thurman was still a little boy, his mother allowed him to come outside after his bedtime in order to see the wonder of Halley’s comet coursing through the sky.  Looking up at this amazing celestial sight, Howard was awestruck, and I guess also a little apprehensive.  As he and his mother stood there, heads bent back to watch the blazing comet in the sky, the boy asked his mother, “What will happen to us if that comet falls out of the sky?”

He recalled that his mother waited a short time before answering his question, and he noticed a prayerful look on her face.  Then she said to him, “Nothing will happen to us, Howard; God will take care of us.”*

Thurman recalls this story while reflecting on the profound unfairness of the world.  And, as I say, it puts me in mind of Audrey because of the way she talked about death.  More precisely, it puts me in mind of the way Audrey talked to me about talking about death with children.

In the lives of so many of her patients, so many of her children, something awful had just fallen out of the sky, and they and their families quite literally did not know if they would survive; they had no idea what would happen to them.  Early in her career, Audrey knew that many of her patients would not survive.  She was not satisfied to let it be, of course, and she would go about changing that fact.  She was marvelously effective at changing the facts of pediatric cancer survival, along with Dan and others.  But, as I say, early on, she knew that many of her patients would not survive.  But she also knew something else, something that she surely knows even better now: she knew that God will take care of us.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me,” which was a way of assuring us that God will take care of us.

In her reflections on the ‘86 lambing season, her first experience as a shepherd, Audrey wrote about a lamb whose mother had died.  She wrote that “we took [the] orphan lamb,” to a ewe who had just delivered her own lamb.  We “smeared [the lamb] with uterine fluid and membranes and tried to put it to the newly delivered ewe….  She accepted him for a few hours, but soon favored her own lamb and started pushing the imposter away.  Getting ewes to accept lambs other than their own is successful in about 50% of the time.”

Audrey’s life was not just about being a physician, or pioneering researcher, or a founder of things, a visionary woman who cared, or a rider, or a SCUBA diver - she was all those things and more.  Audrey’s life was about accepting lambs other than her own.  She did this with great love, in a world that she knew to be unfair.  And she did it with great faith that God will take care of us.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me.”

Right about now, I suspect, Audrey may be arguing with her savior:  “I’m the good shepherd!”

“No, I am the good shepherd!”

But they’ll work it out.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
at the funeral of Dr. Audrey Evans
20 October 2022

* Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited, p 46