Trust in the Promise

Sermon notes from 12/4/22

For as long as I can remember, I have had the insufferable habit of reading the very end of books before I finish the opening chapters. Not the entire end, of course, but enough to check and see that the names of the main characters are still there – to make sure everybody is still alive. To my husband’s eternal irritation, I read the synopsis of movies and television shows before we see them. I like spoilers, and my experience of media is improved when I have a sense of where the story will be taking me. I realize that this paints a particular sort of psychological portrait about myself, but, you know, we are who we are. 

It is only recently when I’ve wondered if this tendency has something to do with why I am so passionately a Christian. For all the uncertainties and questions and theological puzzles we inherit in this tradition, we know the end of the story. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ after three days in the grave restores the brokenness of humanity to wholeness. We are reconciled to our Creator by the pure sacrifice of his only Son. And those who believe in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. You’d think you would need to read until the end of Revelation to get to the good part, but the spoilers are right there in the Gospels at the beginning. This is my kind of book. 

The prophet Isaiah offers us a vision of this wholesome ending in his proclamation regarding the shoot that shall grow out from the stump of Jesse. What shall happen at the arrival of the One upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests? Well, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them…They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

This sounds like a lovely ending– a perfectly wonderful gift to those of us who like to know the story is heading. And yet…this harmony and perfection is not yet what we see. Jesus has come. He has risen. And yet hurt and destruction remain apparently everywhere. If the earth is full of anything, it is certainly heartache more acutely than knowledge of the Lord. 

The prophecies of Isaiah seemed quite distant from his own 8th century. The people of Israel were at the precipice of another century filled with persecution and terror. This vision of wholesome peace seems quite distant from us. What is more familiar to us than the ways that human beings continue to disappoint one another?

But there is someone who takes our hand. There is someone who stretches back his arms to the prophet Isaiah, and stretches them forward to us, and leads us faithfully, unstoppably toward Jesus. 

“Prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” 

When John the Baptist is introduced in scripture, he is introduced in the very same way as the prophets of the Old Testament: Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Micah, Haggai, Zerchariah. The text positions John to step into the light as the one who will be the last prophet, the one singing the final hymn of preparation and imminent redemption. He is the bridge between the Old Testament and the New - the one who gathers those of us yearning for the ending across all time and distance and joins us in praise of the God who is soon to come among us in the Word made flesh. 

If Mary was the very first Christian, and if Joseph was the second, John is the third, recognizing Jesus and leaping with joy when he is still a baby in his mother’s womb. I love to think of Mary and Joseph as the very first Church - the first group of two or three gathered in His name. And soon, John and his mother Elizabeth are the first to join their little house church. 

And so it is John - the prophet between the Old and the New - who takes our hand in this in-between season of Advent. In his call to preparation and repentance, John shifts something for us. He reminds us that we are not meant to put our trust merely in a prophecy, but in a promise. 

A prophecy may tell you what is going to happen, but a promise will tell you what you are meant for. A prophecy might inspire a vision of the future, but a promise will begin something right now. A promise signifies a relationship – it solidifies the connection between the one who promises and the one to whom something is promised. It is a bond - an assurance: a covenant fiercer than destiny and nearer than blood. 

And herein lies the challenge and the blessing: We cannot know what the end of a promise looks like. We can only trust in the One who is doing the promising. We cannot skip to the final few pages and see who remains alive. But we can put our trust in our Lord whose name is Life. 

John reminds us that the years that we are granted are not meant for spending in augury or divination – in half-baked efforts at control or wealth or power. We know what we need to know. Everything we have that is not Christ will pass away. This in-between Advent season is our yearly invitation to encounter this truth not from a place of anxiety, but with a heart of hope. We cannot know what the end of a promise looks like. We can only trust in the One who is doing the promising, and the One who is doing the promising is good and kind. He is all power, all truth, all mercy, all grace. He is all knowledge and beauty, all joy and all peace. He is health and strength. He is Bread and Wine. He is the source of light and life, the fonts from which flows every spring. He is the Sun in the east, the brightness of the snow at midwinter. The comfort in every gentle, tender thing. He is Salvation, sweet and light. He is the morning. He is rest. He is love. He is ours. 

Preached by Mtr. Brit Frazier
4 December 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

A Is For Advent

A is for Advent and A is for Asteroid.

Let’s start with the asteroid.  In September of this year, NASA sent a small spacecraft smashing into an asteroid about 7 million miles away from us.  They believe the impact was sufficiently powerful to have changed the orbit of the asteroid.  NASA scientists point out that it’s the first time humans have altered the location of a celestial body in space, so it was a big deal.   The “New Yorker” called it “a rehearsal for saving the world,” since the purpose of the mission was to see if we could successfully change the path of a dangerous comet or asteroid that might be hurtling toward earth, as we are pretty sure has happened in the past, with bad results for the dinosaurs.  We don’t want to be tomorrow’s dinosaurs.  What used to be science-fiction has become science.  So, A is for Asteroid.

But A is also for Advent.  And in Advent the church turns her mind toward the fulfillment of time, the end of the world, the second coming of Christ, and the dawning of the new Jerusalem.  In doing so, the church has pondered what she calls the “last things:”Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.  If you thought Advent was a way of marking the weeks left to shop before Christmas, you skipped a lot of Sunday School.  So, every Advent we hear in the scriptures warnings about the end of time, the end of life as we know it, at the second coming of Christ, as we heard from Jesus in the Gospel today:

“…two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.  Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.  Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

But, just as what used to be science-fiction has become science, what used to be faith has become fiction in the minds of many people.  And nothing could seem more fictitious, and perhaps more laughable, than these kinds of warnings about the end of the world, except to a certain brand of Christian, who probably would not think much of the kind of religion we practice here on Locust Street, anyway.

It was surprising to discover, during the TV binges of the pandemic, a film about a large comet that is headed toward earth and is almost certain to destroy human life on our planet.  For my purposes, let’s stipulate that a comet is an awful lot like an asteroid.  The week that I watched “Don’t Look Up,” it was among the top ten offerings on Netflix - which I assume means a lot of other people watched it, too.  The film is mostly political satire, and I’ll spare you details of the plot.  Suffice it to say that a comet is on a collision course for the earth and eventually, everyone is freaking out about it, since it has become clear that the comet’s impending impact, and the apocalypse that will result is a matter of science, not fiction.  So, A is also for Apocalypse.

Late in the film, a character named Yule is introduced.  He is a young, skater dude with authority issues.  At one point in the movie Yule is lying on the hood of a car beside one of the central female characters.  As they stare up at the sky, from whence the comet and their near-certain doom is coming, the question of religion comes up.  Yule says, “I feel like if God wanted to destroy the Earth, He would destroy the Earth.”

The young woman, Kate, is surprised by this.  “You believe in God?” she asks.

Yule replies, “My parents raised me evangelical, and I hate them.  But I found my own way to it.  My own relationship.  I’d appreciate it if you didn’t advertise it though.”

Kate reassures him, “I won’t tell anybody. I think it’s kind of sweet.”

To which Yule replies, “Wanna make out?”

Enjoy for a moment that insightful miniature portrait of the way faith doesn’t always become fiction, even when a great deal has been done to undermine it.

The real surprise of the film - from a faith perspective - comes toward the very end, when the comet’s impact is only seconds away.  The government has already tried to smash things into the comet and change its course or destroy it.  But the attempt failed.  Now, those who have managed to escape the impending destruction and death have already blasted off in their spaceships.  For everyone else, for all those who have been left behind, apocalypse awaits, and with it the implied threats of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.

Yule and Kate and their friends have gathered in someone’s home, around a table.  They know that the comet will soon destroy them and the world as they know it.  They are well aware that this is the time of last things.  The screenplay directions say, “Everyone at the table has joined hands and are giving thanks.”  And at the conclusion of this short expression of thanks, someone says, “Maybe we should say ‘Amen.’  Should we do that?”

Another replies, “Don’t look at me. I don’t know how to... What, do you just say, ‘Amen?’”

But Yule, the disaffected evangelical, who’s found his own way to God but doesn’t want it advertised, knows what to do.  “I got this,” he says.  “I got it.”  And then, with no tongue in cheek, without a hint of irony or sarcasm, in a moment the likes of which I cannot recall in recent film, the young skater dude begins to pray.

As the world is about to end, and the powers that be have fled, and the marvels of science have fallen short, and our own human failings have very clearly gotten the better of us, and catastrophe of biblical proportion is about to destroy human life on earth, a group of uncertain and imperfect, and heretofore mostly faithless people gather around a table, hold hands, give thanks, and pray.

This is how the prayer goes:

“Dearest Father and almighty creator, we ask for your grace despite our pride, your forgiveness despite our doubt, and most of all, your love to soothe our fears in these dark times. May we face your divine will with courage and open hearts of acceptance. In your name... Amen.”*

Long ago, St. Paul wrote to the people of the early church in Rome “You know what time it is.”  Maybe he wasn’t giving too much credit to the members of that church in Rome, but he might be giving too much credit to later generations, if he thought we might be reading his letters.  I’m not sure we have any idea at all what time it is.

St. Paul does go on, however, and in what follows he has been correct for every generation: “it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”  But at the present moment we cannot easily tell science from fiction or fiction from faith, because we don’t know what to believe.  St. Paul knew what to believe, and he saw that “the night is far gone, the day is near,” as he wrote.  And when you know that the night is far gone, when you know that things will soon come crashing down, then there is the possibility of focusing the heart and the mind on God.

A is for Advent, and for Asteroids, and also for Apocalypse.  In our own day and age, it’s hard for us to see that the night is far gone and the day is near.  It’s been so long since St. Paul wrote those words that many people have concluded he was just plain wrong.

But I think that a world that uses science to smash space vehicles into asteroids in order to avoid an apocalypse is a world that has actually begun to contemplate the last things.  And if, in such a world, when you conceive scientifically of asteroids that could trigger an apocalypse, and you conclude that the only good and helpful thing to do in such circumstances might be to pray… well, I think that such a world can conceive of Advent, too: that the Son of God will come again, in the fullness of time, when the night is far gone, and the day is near.

A is for Advent, and Asteroids, and Apocalypse.  Even though we live in a society that can hardly tell science from fiction or fiction from faith, Jesus is still coming to us.  God will still accomplish God’s purposes.  Time will lead to some decisive moment, with or without an asteroid.  And every single one of us will face the implications of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.  So it’s good to have a prayer on our lips.  And for starters this one does just fine:

“Dearest Father and almighty creator, we ask for your grace despite our pride, your forgiveness despite our doubt, and most of all, your love to soothe our fears in these dark times. May we face your divine will with courage and open hearts of acceptance. In your name... Amen.”

Do you just say “Amen?”  Yes, you do.  A is for Amen, too.  So be it, Lord.  Come to us in your time and find us awake and ready to meet you.  The night is far gone, and the day is near.

Amen.  Amen.  Amen.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
27 November 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

* All quotations are from the film, “Don’t Look Up,” written by Adam McKay. 2021, distributed by Netflix.

The last supper scene of “Don’t Look Up.”

A Crisis Of Authority

If it’s a crisis of authority you are looking for, you have come to the right place… if, that is, the specific place you have come to is the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke.  St. Luke shows us that what happened, when Jesus was betrayed and arrested, was that a crisis of authority unfolded.  Throughout this narrative, various people try to take control, or have the opportunity to try to do so, but none of them acts with real authority.

In the previous chapter, the evangelist reported that it was “the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders” who came to arrest Jesus on the Mount of Olives.  But all they could do was to detain Jesus, and mock him, and beat him.  They did not have the authority to do what they wanted to do with Jesus, which was to get rid of him.

So they took Jesus to Pontius Pilate, who was the local Roman governor.  When the Jewish officials brought Jesus to him with their complaints, Pilate told them essentially that he had no dog in this fight.  They were looking to him to use his authority to punish Jesus, but Pilate didn’t want to get involved.

So Pilate sent Jesus to Herod Antipas, who ruled in Galilee and other parts north of Jerusalem, with Roman permission.  Herod happened to be in Jerusalem at the time, and he had been curious about Jesus.  Some people had started the rumor that Herod was plotting to kill Jesus.  But if that was the case, he didn’t follow through.  Given a chance to take authority over Jesus’ fate, Herod, instead, sent him back to Pilate, who, as we already know, didn’t want the responsibility of dealing with him, either.

Pilate, like Herod, forfeited the opportunity to exercise authority on the second go-around, too.  He could have intervened, but he didn’t, and instead, with the aid of his own soldiers, he let the conspirators take matters into their own hands.

As is often the case, those in authority didn’t see the crisis in authority taking place.  And you would think that the crisis of authority would have come to an end once Jesus was nailed to the Cross.  But on the Cross, new dimensions of the crisis of authority came into view.  St. Luke tells us that once Jesus was nailed to the Cross by the soldiers, and hoisted up into place in between the crosses of two criminals, the first thing he did was to exercise authority: he pronounced forgiveness on those who were perpetrating the act.  He was not yet dead, but he had already forgiven his killers.

The religious leaders who stood by rejected his authority.  They “scoffed at him,” St. Luke tells us, and even the soldiers “mocked him… saying, ‘If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!”    And someone with a strong streak of sarcasm attached an inscription to his Cross saying, “This is the king of the Jews.”  If there was going to be a crisis of authority, after all, someone was going to exploit it at the expense of the Jews.  No wonder everyone acted with disdain.  Here was an act of cruel injustice being carried out on no one’s authority but the power of the mob, with the assistance of the government, whose only judgment was to acquiesce to pressure.  Because as far as the Romans were concerned there was not much at stake, and it was probably just as well to be done with a trouble-maker.

The rejection of Jesus seemed nearly complete when even one of the criminals being executed next to him cried out to him, “Are you not the Messiah?  Save yourself and us!”  But the church has always heard this cry as more of a sneer than a plea, and I think it’s correct to hear it that way.

Throughout the arrest, the so-called trial, and the crucifixion of Jesus, a crisis of authority allowed the jeering of a mob to result in a rejection of God’s love, and an act of injustice that was motivated by anger, jealousy, suspicion, and fear.  People who might have exercised authority either failed to do so, or found that they possessed so very little actual authority that they were powerless without the support of the mob.  Within this power vacuum, only Jesus spoke with real authority: the authority of one who has the power to forgive.  But since almost no one was looking for forgiveness, his words fell on mostly deaf ears.

The repeated accusation that Jesus was the king of the Jews, might have given him an opportunity to try to claim some authority, as long as he was willing to accept the terms of his accusers.  But Jesus would not accept those terms, which he knew to be a trap, in any case.  And to the very end, Jesus allowed his ministry to rest on the authority of his power to forgive, and his readiness to love.

In our own day and age, we are surrounded by crises of authority.  There is an urgent struggle for power taking place in this country that amounts to a question of where legitimate authority comes from.  This nation was founded on the idea that real and legitimate authority could and should be derived from the will of the people.  But these days, that ideal is actively being replaced by the very old-fashioned idea that authority rests with anyone who can grab power and hold onto it.

Vladimir Putin is also testing old modes of exercising power to try to claim authority.  And it is unclear that he is prepared to learn the lesson that is becoming clear to the rest of us: that the capacity to inflict harm is not the same thing as authority.

The church’s authority has been in decline for hundreds of years, not least because her leaders have often grabbed for power where they ought not to have done, undermining her real authority, which should have rested on love.  And we have too often failed to understand how essential is the paradox that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness, wherein also lies a substantial claim of his authority.

The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution all signaled crises of authority, and new ways in which authority would be understood and accepted.  Who knows what they’ll call our current age, or what the outcome of our crises will be?

Almost no one is looking to Jesus for authority these days, at least not in advanced economic societies like our own.  So it’s helpful to me to reflect that at that dark hour on Calvary, no one was looking to Jesus for authority, either; even though he was the only one who had exercised real authority, by the power of forgiveness.  There, on the Cross, the failure and rejection of Jesus was real and nearly complete.   

But in the moments before Jesus died, just before noon, when darkness was about to come over the whole land, there was one soul who seemed to sense that all was not lost, and who seemed to be able to tell where real power, and real authority were to be found, even though he himself had come up against the powers and authorities of this world.  That one soul has no name.  He is only “the other.”  He is the other criminal, crucified alongside Jesus, who, in his own weakness and dereliction, sees past the failure and humiliation all around him, sees past the injustice and the fear, sees past his own guilt, sees past the death that is inevitably coming for him soon.  And he speaks to Jesus in one of only a very, very few instances in the Gospels in which someone addresses the Master by name.  “Jesus,” he says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

If we claim that Christ is a king, almost everything we need to know about that claim is contained in this moment, shaped by a series of crises of human authority.  Power has been abused.  Religion has been corrupted.  Authority is up for grabs.  No one can be counted on to do what is right.  The result is plain for everyone to see.  The desire of the blood-thirsty will be satisfied - for there have always been those who are thirsty for blood.  And from this morass, the promise of salvation comes to one who has not even had the opportunity to imagine resurrection yet.  It comes to the one who sees past all the failures and crises of authority and simply, somehow knows who Jesus is.  Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

The response is immediate: “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to him, “today you will be with me in paradise.”

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Once, years ago, I met a prince, an actual prince, at a reception, the purpose of which was to make such introductions.  The meeting, such as it was, was nothing more than a formality.  And although I cling to the memory of the occasion, I have no doubt that the prince in question possesses no memory of it, and, in fact, forgot the introduction as soon as he moved on to the next person at the reception.  Such is the way of things.

If you want to know what it means to call Christ a king, what you need to know is this: that Jesus is the one who remembers you when he comes into his kingdom.  In a world that is deeply confused about authority, even in crisis around authority - when weak leaders fail to exercise authority for the sake of justice, and when unprincipled people grab for power just because they want it and they think they can reach it - Jesus asserts his authority, mostly by forgiving.  And Jesus remembers you.  Yes, Jesus remembers you.

Jesus has already come into his kingdom, and Jesus remembers you and me.  Forgiving us.  Remembering us.  Surrounded by a crisis of authority.  Beaten, betrayed, and bloodied.  Counted as lost, and on the verge of giving up the ghost.  No wonder he remembers us.  He knows us, and our sufferings at least as well as our joys.

And Jesus remembers us.  He remembers us constantly, in every conceivable sense of the word.  Jesus remembers us when he comes into his kingdom.  And he forgives us.

Jesus remembers us - now and always.  That’s what it means to say that Christ is a king.  Jesus is the one who remembers us when he comes into his kingdom.

And to be remembered by the king of love - that is paradise!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
20 November 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia