Contagious

If there is one thing we know a lot about these days, it’s contagion.  I don’t have to remind you about ventilation and masks and vaccinations.  Those are just the facts of life.  But contagion is not confined to viruses, as this past week has made clear in so many troubling ways.  Many things are contagious.  And if we hadn’t known it before, we know it this week: violence is contagious.  

Consider the many helicopters that hovered over Philadelphia Friday night.  Did you hear them?  That was the sound of anxiety about the effect of the video of five Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols, who of course died of his injuries three days later.  According to the New York Times, the decision to release the video on Friday night was made because at that hour businesses would be closed, people would have a chance to get home from work before the reaction to the video began, and the community and the world would have had time to process the fact that action had been taken in the case and the five officers had been fired, arrested, and charged with murder. The release was timed, in other words, in expectation that its violent content would spark a violent response. There were some who criticized this decision, noting that to release the video on a weekend was itself a risky idea, since protestors and potential rioters would have time on their hands, and violence might be more likely then than during the work week.  

I don’t know when a harrowing video that shows the forces of law and order taking an innocent man’s life might best be released.  What I want us to think about is the apparent fact that we live in an atmosphere of contagious violence and fear of contagious violence, and of course guns.  It feels like a given.  The fact that there have been protests but widespread violence has not occurred this weekend seems remarkable to many of us.  

This was also a week of mass shootings, a contagion that spreads here in our country more than anywhere else.  ABC news was led to reflect on the string of shootings in California this week, first in the San Joaquin Valley and then in Monterey Park and then in Half Moon Bay and then in Oakland.  The experts were pondering the way one shooting seems to call forth the next.  As one put it, “There are mass shootings waiting to happen, so one of them can influence the other.”  It’s like something in the air, something that nudges a shooter forward out of hiding.  It might actually be the attention we give to mass shooters that moves a troubled soul from the terrible state of preparing to kill over into the dreadful act of killing.  They actually used the term “mass shooting contagion.” We have to think now not only about how terrible crimes happen, but about how violence replicates itself to cause more violence.

Surely we can also use the word “contagion” to talk about a six-year-old in Virginia who brings a gun to school and shoots his teacher.  We can all be thankful that the teacher is going to be ok physically, but what are we going to do about the pestilence in our environment that infects a six year old?  How many school shootings has he heard about?  How many safety drills has he been through?  And where else will this lead?  Who will now imitate that child’s troubled imitation of what school shooters do?

So here we are, in this atmosphere, thick with violence and the fear of violence and the replication of violence.  In this atmosphere we fret about how and when to tell the truth about a violent police attack.  In this atmosphere we worry that press coverage of a mass shooting will cause mass shootings.  In this atmosphere we see that school shootings have become stories that children tell themselves and even perform for others.  We live in a world so full of deathly spiritual illness that even to tell the truth about violence may be to spread violence.  

In this atmosphere it can be hard to hear Jesus say, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” though we know we need someone to speak a word for peace.  In this atmosphere it matters that Jesus understands contagion.  Or let’s go further than that.  Let’s talk about how the contagion all around us is a corruption and a perverse distortion of the way blessedness spreads.  Violent contagion is an inversion of the way that blessedness spreads from the person of Jesus and catches all of us up.   

So let’s get caught up in the blessed words of Jesus.

From the beginning, what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount is a condensation, a distillation, of the environment in which he has been moving.  He has been healing and teaching, moving through the people and drawing them to God in himself.  When he climbs up that mountainside like Moses on Mt. Sinai and turns to give the word of God to the people, he is following a familiar prophetic pattern, replicating prophetic peace.  Like the commandments that spread from Moses’s encounter with God to the Hebrew people and to the world all around them, these words of blessing from Jesus feel designed to be repeated, remembered, written on our hearts.  They echo through the Gospel as fundamental truths.

And each line of this speech speaks of responsive connection between God and the people.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says, looking at the poor in spirit who have been moved to follow him.  The poor in spirit are lowly enough not to try to own themselves, not to try to lord it over others.  The poor in spirit are fundamentally humble.  And Jesus looks at them and loves them.  Actually, he is one of them.  That’s the truth he carries in his body: that God is somehow humble, small, powerful in a way that bears no resemblance to violence.  Jesus will show the full power of God by being subject to violence.

So when Jesus looks out at the poor in spirit, he reassures them that he sees them, that God sees them, that in the pure air of the kingdom of heaven their poverty of spirit is answered, reflected back to them.  When the poor in spirit are seen in the kingdom of heaven, the King of Heaven himself answers them with poverty of spirit.

God willingly, joyfully, gives himself over to those who give themselves to God.  Or better, those followers of Jesus who are poor in spirit have been drawn to Jesus in the first place because they sense in him that same humility, a radical willingness to be poured out for them before they even begin to try to earn it by pouring themselves out and following.

Contagion is paltry by comparison with this mutual giving.  Violence is a sick misunderstanding.

And Jesus speaks like this, line by line, repeating the pattern of blessedness and reciprocity.  Reward is too small a word to use, here.  It doesn’t do justice to the mutual embrace that Jesus is describing. “Be blessed and get your reward” is a poor way of summarizing what Jesus wants to give his followers.  What Jesus wants to give us.  “If you mourn you will be comforted” is, as any mourner knows, an impoverished explanation for what it feels like if someone actually cares for us in our pain.  Mourning isn’t comforted by a shelling out of benefits from some generous person.  Mourning seeks embrace.  The pain of separation can only be answered by union.

So too the merciful.  Think about it.  They who have figured out how to give others more grace than they deserve, are not looking for payment for services rendered when they get to heaven, and that’s not what Jesus is offering them.  The merciful already live in a world in which love and mercy spread as far as the eye can see.  They already live in an abundance that defies description.  They already know that God is in the mercy, giving to them as they give to others.  They are already in heaven in some sense.  Heaven somehow reached them and showed them what mercy was, and now they are reaching back to heaven, mercy following upon mercy.  No one is keeping count.  That’s what mercy is.  

And the peacemakers make peace, too, out of some deep confidence already that violence is unnecessary.  Because they are children of God.  When we hear Jesus call them children of God we want to make peace, and that peace—even the desire to make that peace—is a sign that God has been sheltering and nurturing us all along.  We don’t “start” peace.  We receive it.  We pass it on.  We live in it.

Contagion?  Yes, I fear it.  But I’m not taking my eyes off Jesus on that mountain, spreading peace.  I’m not going to develop an immunity to these words.   When violence spreads, when the air thickens and grows noxious, remember that any bit of peace we can make will already be part of an infinite exchange of blessing.  To make peace, to show mercy, even to mourn: these will be signs among us that the kingdom of heaven is near.  We don’t have to start them or invent them or earn them.  God is already close to us.  Mercy is already ours.  Peace is already among us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/us/tyre-nichols-video-release-time.html?smid=url-share

https://abcnews.go.com/US/california-massacres-suggest-phenomenon-mass-shooting-contagion-experts/story?id=96632107

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
January 29, 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Other People's Sins

Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!  (John 1:29)

So rare an unusual is the topic of sin in many churches these days that one of the first temptations, on considering preaching about sin, is to talk forcefully about someone else’s sin. And, oh, how delicious it is to sink one’s teeth into the failings of someone else - failings that are so plain to us, and, should, of course, be plain to them too, if only those poor, sinful souls were not so delusional and self-serving.  It’s easy to shine a light on someone else’s sin so that others can behold it and see.  Oh, pity the poor sinner, who should have known better!  The more people divorce themselves from religion, as so many people have done these days, the more sin becomes a specialty topic of  a dwindling demographic.  You can accuse someone else of being a sinner, but if neither they nor anyone else cares, then what of it?  You can’t have a witch trial if everyone agrees that witches are just living their own truth!  But I don’t wish to suggest that I am nostaligic for the days of witch trials - far from it.  I’m just meaning to acknowledge that it’s much easier to deal with someone else’s sin than with your own, and any clergy-person who has not learned this lesson is probably in some measure of peril.

I’m also willing to bet that not many of us showed up to church today because we are preoccupied with our own sin.  We came here to be uplifted today, not beaten down.  We came here to be fed, not to be put on a diet.  We came here to bask for a while in beauty, not to be covered with the odor of shame.  And right we are!  We have come here for the right reasons - do not let me talk you out of that assurance.  That is not my intention or my desire!

The Prayer Book gives us a prayer once a year that asks God to forgive us for “those things of which our conscience is afraid,” which sounds like a reasonable definition of sin to me.  And the thing of it is, if we define sin this way, we’re only ever in a position to know about own own sins.  And the possibility that someone else’s sins could be our problem to deal with begins to fade.

One problem with being distracted by other people’s sins is that the solution to someone else’s sin is also someone else’s savior.  Using the language of John the Baptist, that would make Jesus someone else’s lamb.  “Here is the lamb of God,’ he says, “who takes away the sin of the world.”  This message is only important to you if you think you may have some sin of your own to deal with.  I believe that John the Baptist included his own sins in this formula, since I think he had a powerfully active conscience, so I don’t think he is guilty here of addressing only other people’s sins.  I think there was plenty of which his conscience was afraid.

The image of the lamb of God surely rests on the shared memory of the story of the Exodus and the Passover, when the blood of the slaughtered lambs was smeared on the doorposts of the houses of the children is Israel as the sign -for them and for God - of their impending deliverance from slavery.  But I have another point of reference for lambs that I can’t get out of my head.  It’s from an essay that Dr. Audrey Evans wrote about the first time she went to Scotland to assist in the birthing of lambs during lambing season on a farm there.  She wrote about an “orphan lamb,” but she didn’t explain the circumstances of its orphanhood, only the fact that the little lamb was in need of a mother of its own.  Audrey took the orphaned lamb and, by her account, she “smeared with uterine fluid and membranes” of a recently delivered ewe; and then presented the orphan to that ewe, hoping she would care for the motherless lamb.

“She accepted him for a few hours,” Audrey wrote, “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 also knew that sheep and shepherds each knowing who they belong to is a significant theme in Jesus’ teaching.

At Audrey’s funeral, I reflected that one of her greatest and most beautiful gifts was that she spent her lifetime accepting lambs that were not her own.  And I think this was a fair assessment.  But I also know that part of the reason Audrey could do that was because she knew that Jesus wasn’t just someone else’s savior, someone else’s lamb.  She had accepted Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, which included her sins, too.  I know for a fact that Audrey was intentional in assessing the things that the Prayer Book would call “those things of which [her] conscience [was] afraid.”  And she did her best - not always successfully, like anyone else - to be accountable to her own conscience.

Here we are, early in a new year, with lots of reasons to be glad to see the year behind us gone.  So many of the reasons I’m glad to see the back of 2022 have to do with other people’s sins.  And since sin is not a favorite topic of mine to preach on, I have found it tempting indeed to spend some time stewing with you over other people’s sins.

I have a friend who used to ask me about “Saint Audrey” as he called her.  And I always chafed when I heard him say this, since I knew how unfair it is for us to expect people - even someone like Audrey - to live up to such a reputation.  And also because I knew that Audrey had spent time working out with God at least some of the things of which her conscience was afraid.  Now that she’s gone, however, I think of the way saints - flawed though they may be - provide us with examples of how to live our lives in Christ.  I never knew Audrey to be all that concerned about other people’s sins.  But I knew her to be deeply concerned about sheep and shepherds each knowing who they belong to.  Maybe that’s where her saintliness was to be found.

If we were to learn from her, maybe we could spend this year in part, learning to worry less about other people’s sins and more about those things of which our own conscience is afraid.  And if we did that, I wonder if we would also be more ready to see Jesus not as someone else’s savior, someone else’s lamb, but as the Lamb of God who, if he takes away the sin of the world, surely takes away your sin and my sin too?

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
15 January 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Dr. Audrey Evans

Epiphany in the Himalayas

My annual pre-Christmas bout of Covid gave me an opportunity for some more Netflix bingeing, which included an Epiphany story hidden within the docu-series “Aftershock,” about the disastrous 2015 earthquake that rocked Nepal.  I’m warning you that when I say the story is “hidden,” I mean that you are going to be wondering for a while what any of this has to do with the Epiphany.  Within the series is told the narrative of a group of young Israeli guys who are trekking through the Langtang Valley of Nepal when the quake hits.

It’s easy to forget how devastating that earthquake was.  It left 9,000 people dead throughout the country and 2.5 million people homeless.  Across Nepal, tens of thousands of people were thrown into survival mode, including the small group of Israeli tourists.

It turns out that this group of young Israeli men were particularly sensitive to the cultural divide between them and the local Nepalis, which was heightened by the crisis.  The Israelis got stranded outside of a little village, and events quickly transpired that left them feeling vulnerable.  One of the young men, named Yuval, explained as he was interviewed:

“I'm telling the rest of the Israelis, ‘Listen, we all are in the most danger out of everyone here.’  The one thought I had in my mind,” he continued, “was that getting rescued would be a freaking battle for my life. And maybe a violent one, potentially.”*

What had happened in a short period of time, largely as a product of mistakes that were made or actions that were misunderstood, was that the Israelis felt at odds with their Nepali fellow-victims.  And the more at odds they felt with their fellow victims, the more threatened they felt.  The extreme nature of the crisis served to heighten tensions and put everyone on edge.  And the more on edge everyone became, the less likely was the possibility of trust amongst strangers.

It transpired that one of the young Israeli men had a GPS safety device that could communicate with a private Israeli company to arrange for their rescue.  Secretly they used the device to communicate with potential rescuers, their anxiety growing as the hours passed.  Yuval determined that they required "not just a rescue, but we must be rescued by people with weapons, as the situation could deteriorate any minute."  And they spent a worrisome and mostly sleepless night wondering what would befall them.

Meanwhile, the rescuers were more than a little confused by the communication they received from the stranded young men.  As the chief of the rescue operation put it, “They asked if we can come armed, which is really unique. This is not acute mountain sickness. This is not hypothermia. This is not what I know.”

By now, I hope you are wondering where is to be found the Epiphany story hidden in this narrative.  If I am correct, you cannot see or discern it yet.  No stand-in for the Holy Family has been introduced, and the GPS device is not the star that guides wise men to the Christ Child’s cradle.  But I also hope that by now you have a sense of the tension, and the possibility of danger from any number of causes, all within a context of grief and loss.  And by now, I hope it’s clear that everyone in the story needs help.  Everyone needs to be rescued - both the Israelis and the Nepalis.  And by now, I hope you realize that there is a real possibility that help is coming, but of course, the question is, who will be rescued and how?

Yuval takes up the narrative again: “… this helicopter lands. Out of this helicopter, some guy jumps out. And I look at this guy in the distance and I see, OK, he's wearing shorts, he's wearing a T-shirt.  And I'm looking at him, and I'm looking for his gun.”  But it becomes clear to Yuval that the rescuer has no gun.  He is completely unarmed and he does not look like he is prepared for the kind of conflict that Yuval is prepared for.  This is concerning, of course, for Yuval, who believed that he had assessed the situation accurately, and believed that he knew what kind of rescue they needed.

Yuval goes on:  “And this guy comes in, and everybody's around him, and everyone's expecting to hear what he has to say. And then he says a sentence which I'll never forget. He says, ”My name is Yochai.  I'm from Israel, and I came to help everyone."

Again from Yuval, “In one second, with one sentence, the whole tension drops flat. That second everyone felt like we're all going to be rescued and believed in it, then there was nothing to fight over.”

“I came to help everyone,” he said.  In the interviews, the rescuer, Yochai, said this: “I think, to defuse a situation, the best way is to have a very, very, very strong tool, which is hope.”

It is tempting to think of the Epiphany as the extended version of the Christmas Pageant, and to be distracted by the camels, and the exotic dress of the magi and their retinue, and to be impressed by the gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.  At some level, it seems as though all these details are what the Epiphany is about, and they must provide the key to understanding the meaning of this feast.

But if this little Child born at Bethlehem was to be the Messiah of God, the Redeemer of Israel, and the inheritor of David’s kingship, then there were some real problems, beginning with the fact that, as Yuval put it, “I'm looking at him, and I'm looking for his gun.”  But there is no gun, no weapon at all.  No army.  No noticeable power to speak of.  Nor any prospects for these assets or war.  And if you were expecting a conquering Messiah, you’d be concerned that this was the way he was making his entrance.  You might also make the mistake that Herod made, (along with a lot of those who opposed Herod), and assume that a messiah who was coming for the Jews was only coming for the Jews, and everyone else could go to hell - more or less literally.

You would not be expecting to hear what Yuval was not expecting to hear.  You would not be expecting to hear the news that “I came to help everyone.”  But that is the meaning of the Epiphany: that Christ is revealed, not as the messianic savior of Israel, who came to save his chosen and select group of people, but as a universal Savior, who came to help everyone.

Yochai, the rescuer, explains  not only the meaning of the Epiphany, but also tells us why this meaning is so important: “I think, to defuse a situation, the best way is to have a very, very, very strong tool, which is hope.”

And this is our hope: that Jesus is here, and he came to help everyone!

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
The Feast of the Epiphany, 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

*  All quotations are from “Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake,” produced by Netflix, 2022

The Langtang Valley, Nepal