Love One Another

Jesus washes the feet of his disciples in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John.  By this time in the narrative, water has repeatedly been established as a sign of life, of transformation, of renewal, of purification, of the Spirit.  We’ve seen Jesus transform water into wine at the wedding in Cana, for instance.  We’ve heard him speak of the water of life with the Samaritan woman at the well, after asking that she give him a drink.  We’ve witnessed the healing of a man at the Pool of Bethesda. We could go on listing examples.  In the thirteenth chapter of John, in any case, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples.

In the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus weeps.  His tears spring forth as he sees that Mary of Bethany has thrown herself at his feet, and that she and her friends are weeping from the sorrow of having lost Lazarus, Mary’s brother whom Jesus will raise.  No doubt, the pain of Lazarus’s death is accompanied by a kind of psychological strain, as Mary and Martha both fight to hold on to faith, to accept what Jesus is telling them about life and resurrection.  Grief and bafflement and perhaps frustration and anger pour forth from Mary in her tears, as she tells the truth: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Without exactly explaining or giving her an answer, Jesus weeps.  This is one of the most powerfully visceral moments in the Gospel, if you ask me.  I’m not really able to feel or comprehend the physical pain of the crucifixion, but bursting into tears when my friends do?  That’s an experience I know and can feel.  

So, in the eleventh chapter of John, we add the tears of Jesus, shared and perhaps brought on sympathetically by the tears of Mary and the others, to the list of powerful signs.  Jesus is giving his followers the water of life here, too, the water of a mysterious transformation that includes sorrow and suffering and emotion, and even a near-involuntary responsiveness to the pain of others that makes Jesus weep when his friends do. Salvation is becoming very physical here, a very human process as well as a divine one.  Love and physical presence are also miracles of grace when God catches them up in the person of Jesus.  
The tears of Mary of Bethany are richly transformed again in the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel.  This time, wonderfully, she seems to transform them herself by the power of her gratitude for the saving of Lazarus.  John tells us that Jesus has returned to Bethany six days before the Passover, so this story takes place during the very period of time we are observing as Holy Week.  At that dinner in Jesus’s honor, Mary takes a pint of pure nard, a precious and strong perfume, and she opens it and pours all of it on the feet of Jesus.  Like the smell of death that surrounded the tomb of Lazarus, the odor of this perfume fills the house, John tells us, enveloping Jesus and all of the company in an atmosphere of reverence and love and beauty.  Like the tears she had cried at Jesus’s feet a chapter earlier, tears that caught up Jesus and his followers in a shared weeping, this costly liquid is an outpouring, an overflowing, and a marking of deep connection.   

Mary dries Jesus’s feet with her hair, hair that is scandalously unbound about her shoulders at this moment.  Again, salvation is physical, and shared, and mysterious.  Mary strikes that same physical posture she had taken while weeping, prostrate at his feet.  She doesn’t hold back.  Jesus doesn’t shrink from her or ask her to explain.  At the wedding in Cana water turned to wine. Here, water has become perfume, tears have become an anointing, death has given way to resurrection, and grief has become gratitude.  

And now tonight in the thirteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, when the time for the Passover has come,  Jesus picks up a basin of water and kneels at the feet of his disciples.  He ties a towel about himself, and washes and dries their feet.  Peter is horrified by the reversal of roles, but the master humbles himself before his disciples and honors them with an act of kindness and hospitality and care.  We needn’t imagine that Mary of Bethany has taught Jesus how to do this by prostrating herself before him on two earlier occasions. But we might register that in this act of tenderness, as Jesus shows extravagant love for his friends, he echoes some of the love and grief that his dear friend Mary has shown him.  

Maybe too there is a kind of reverence here, as Jesus acknowledges that long walk his disciples have taken, the growth and risk and urgency and incomprehension that have drawn them forward to follow him, one dusty foot in front of another.  Maybe there is grief in anticipation of his own suffering.  Maybe there is deep acceptance of the betrayals that are already circulating in the group.  Judas has conspired against him.  Peter still doesn’t know his own capacity to fail as a disciple.  Jesus knows, that is, that he must do the work for which his Father sent him, and he knows that his friends are not ready for that work, any more than they were ready to watch Lazarus die.  Could there be a kind of gratitude at play for Jesus, as there was for Mary?  His friends will hurt him deeply but they are part of the great mystery of death and resurrection.  Without understanding or being ready, they are embraced by the atmosphere of divine love that surrounds Jesus.  Yes he is being kind and hospitable here, but might he also feel a sense of wonder and awe?  There is an almost unbearable human dignity in the disciples as they stumble and fail.  Like us, they will stumble forward to be the church.  Does Jesus feel a reverence for their own tragedy? 

There are so many beautiful forms of mirroring and grace and love and respect in these three chapters from the Gospel of John.  Mary’s devotion to Jesus, mirrored in Jesus’s own tears, has been caught up into this larger wave of grace and blessing and love and reverence that spills over into the washing of the disciples’ feet.  Her tears have become an anointing for his burial.  His act of washing the disciples’ feet has become their commissioning: “As I have done to you,” he says, “so must you do to one another.”  And he does, in a sense, what Mary has done for him.

As he unites his disciples around that table by moving from one to another to show his love and his compassion for them, he expresses again the communion into which he has drawn them, the life for which he is preparing them, the suffering that is to come.  Just as, in the other three Gospels, Jesus takes up bread and wine to proclaim that they are his body, so here he takes up what they bring--Mary’s tears, Peter’s impetuosity, Judas’s betrayal--and makes a sacrament of real presence.  Real, shared, love that is the bedrock and resting place of the church.  

At this end of this evening’s Mass, we will gather up the supreme sacrament of presence that Jesus gave his disciples at another supper.  We will carry this Body of Christ lovingly through the church, to the altar of repose in the Lady Chapel.  We will carry the Body of Christ with love and reverence because we are the body of Christ.  Jesus has washed us in baptism.  Jesus has given us the water of life.  Water and blood have flowed from his side at the crucifixion, and they flow sacramentally through the long years to spring up again among us this evening.  

As we bring the Blessed Sacrament to the Lady Chapel and set it on the Altar of Repose, we are accompanied by the whole Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints, the community of the faithful.  And as we kneel in prayer in that chapel tonight, if our eyes wander a bit, we may see that to our right, on the wall behind the altar, there is a beautiful silver statue of Mary of Bethany, looking down on us and accompanying us in our reverent love for Jesus.  You’ll see her along with a statue of Mary Magdalene on the other side of the chapel. Both Marys hold jars of perfume, as if ready to anoint Jesus again for his burial.  

Those jars, we may imagine, hold some of the perfume of real presence, of love that echoes back and forth from God to us in the person of Jesus, and back through Jesus to the source of all being.  In that shared reverence and awe, Jesus catches up all of our love and our grief and our misunderstanding, and the deep desire we may feel to draw closer to him, to pour out our souls and he pours out his life for us.  And so, because we remember the bending down of Jesus to care for us, and because in his bending he remembers the figure of Mary bent before him, and remembers countless others who have given themselves in loving response to his love—because we remember such outpourings, we prostrate ourselves before the Blessed Sacrament of the Real Presence of our God.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
Maundy Thursday 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Familiar Talk

There was a curious little book published anonymously in England in 1554, the second year of the short reign of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor.  The book is written by a Protestant who laments the return to Catholic doctrines and forms of worship after the death of the young Protestant King Edward VI.  The short title of the book is A Dialogue or Familiar Talk.  Rather wonderfully, the book purports to be a conversation, like a platonic dialogue but friendly and neighborly.  The dialogue or friendly conversation takes place between a man named Oliver, who professes the Gospel, and a man named Nicholas, who is Catholic, out of habit more than conviction.  The conversation consists, of course, of Nicholas saying egregiously un-Protestant things, and being taught the correct faith by the wise and biblical Oliver.

One of my favorite moments in the text occurs on the first page, when the wise Protestant Oliver notes that Catholic Nicholas had not seemed very eager to go to church during the Protestant regime of the previous monarch: “No,” responds Catholic Nicholas, “for when we came there [that is to Protestant services in the reign of Edward VI], there was nothing to do but to hear a priest babble.”  Nicholas is like a child, seeking only to be entertained.  Oliver represents the urgent Reformation task of hearing the word of God and obeying it.  

Nicholas goes on to describe many of the aspects of Catholic liturgy that he approves of, only to be taught again and again by Oliver that such elaborate forms of worship are dangerously misleading practices set up by Catholic bishops, who are “the imps of Antichrist.”  Among the practices discussed are some that might be familiar to us today, the liturgies of Palm Sunday.  And as we hear Oliver inveigh against liturgy, we may begin to feel from our perspective that he too has some limitations as a churchgoer.  

Oliver disapproves, for instance, of the reading or singing of the Gospel of the Passion in parts.  “Lord,” says Protestant Oliver, “what Apes play [they made] of it in great Cathedral churches and abbeys.”  Oliver may be deeply sincere, and he clearly represents the views of our anonymous 16th-century author, but I think you can agree with me that he is missing something.  It’s actually painful to me to read Oliver’s words.  He somehow can’t hear what we just heard: the exquisite faith and devotion, as well as the skill, that go into the singing of the Passion.  What’s beautiful and godly to me is completely lost on him.  

Notably, too, the use of palms offends Oliver, especially when crosses are made out of those palms and blessed, and taken away to be fastened on the doors of private homes, or worse, carried in the purses of superstitious women.

To be fair to the fictional Protestant Oliver, there do seem to have been some very elaborate liturgical practices in place on Palm Sundays in England before the Reformation.  I’m not sure I would have approved of all of them, either.  After the reading of the Gospel, for instance, which was of course in Latin, a boy, or sometimes an adult, would enter the sanctuary dressed in flowing robes like an Old Testament prophet and wearing a fake beard, to sing a verse based on the words of the actual biblical prophet Baruch.  Palm Sunday services before the Reformation also seem to have included the tossing of flowers and cakes to the children of the parish, which as Oliver the Reformer says, made the boys of the parish “lie scrambling together by the ears ‘til all the parish falleth a laughing.”  Poor misguided Nicholas remembers that laughter fondly, never thinking about the loss of intimacy with God that Oliver seeks in the scriptures and in reformed worship.   

It is no accident that Nicholas and Oliver should spend some of their time talking about Palm Sunday. This is one of those days in the church’s year that almost begs us to think about worship, about how exactly God meets us in liturgy and about how we respond.  There is an uneasiness in the joyful procession and the waving of the branches.  Did the crowds in Jerusalem really know who Jesus was?  Did they truly understand his response to empire and to the powers of this world?  And if so, where were they all a week later?  Is our devotion more than a momentary enthusiasm?  

And the reading of the passion narrative should of course unsettle us right down to our souls.  As Jesus is stripped and mocked we see him revealed for who he is in a way that glorious processions and triumph can’t fully embody.  Infinite love, meeting us in powerlessness and abandonment.  Pilate washes his hands and even the thieves who are dying with Jesus turn to him in scorn.  Judas tells the truth.  This is baffling.  Jesus’s own words are used against him, as the soldiers taunt him: “Thou that destroyest the Temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself.”  They turn Jesus’s words inside out, turn scripture inside out, really, turning Jesus’s prophecy about himself into painful mockery.  We are watching religion itself, our religion and theirs, seem to crumble as Jesus is defeated.  

We might even say that from our historical vantage point, as modern Christians, the words of the Gospel turn against us.  In a moment of more than bitter irony, as Pilate denies responsibility for Jesus’s death, Matthew has the people utter what can only echo through the millennia as a curse upon Christians: “His blood be on us, and on our children.”  Knowing the ghastly antisemitism that has sprung from these words—knowing that that ghastly antisemitism is no doubt springing up afresh this year, as it seems to do perennially—I think we can only shudder and pray for healing.  And work for the protection of our Jewish neighbors and family members.  You wouldn’t be alone if, hearing that terrible sentiment expressed in the scriptures, you were to wonder whether you could trust this assembly, trust this religion, trust Jesus, or trust what has been made of him by Christians.

Yes, these words should be heard in terms of the early church’s crisis of separation from Judaism.  It’s crucial to understand that these words are likely referring not to some imagined blood curse, but to the historical event of the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, which hangs over the gospels like a great shadow.  But don’t make peace with these words.  Don’t let them be explained away.  Stay awake to the failure of even the earliest Christians to love as Jesus loves.  Stay alert to the indictment of us in this story.

The veil of the Temple is rent, religion totters, the earth shakes, the graves open.  And we are here on the edge of a great chasm, on the edge of Holy Week, on the edge of death and resurrection and salvation.  We are moving uneasily between a joyful ritual with palms and a fearful encounter with the living God.  Our questions can’t be contained or answered with words like “Catholic,” or “Protestant,” or “Christian,” or “Jew.”  The Gospel narrative itself, presented with great care and love and reverence, catches us up in mistrust and suspicion.  The great unsettling controversies of the Reformation are only faint images of the bafflement and paradox in which we are being immersed.    

This is Holy Week.  This is the action of God in our liturgy and our scriptures and our assembled community.  We are walking with Jesus through the sin of the world, that he might take it away.  Pray, and walk through this week.  Let the word of God dwell in us.  Let Jesus do his shattering work in us, though the Church’s imperfect, holy, ministry.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
Palm Sunday 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Can These Bones Live?

As you may know, in recent years, I have been sporadically updating the MIBS - which is a non-scholarly, highly idiosyncratic ranking of certain questions from the Bible.  “MIBS,” you may recall, stands for the “Mullen Interrogative Biblical Scale.”  It’s a short list, seldom updated.  The number one spot on the MIBS belongs to Pontius Pilate, who asked, “What is truth?”  Coming in at number two is God himself (which seems wrong, but, what can I say?): God asked Adam and Eve, “Who told you that you were naked?”  I’ve lost track of any other entries on the MIBS - I’m somewhat disorganized.  But I think we have a new entry today.

But first, some statistics!  If it’s statistics you’re looking for, about the decline of the Christian faith and religion in America, you will have no difficulty finding them.

In 2020 - that’s before the pandemic - church attendance had dropped 36 percent in America from levels in 1993. (Barna)

In that same time period the number of people who said they had prayed in the last seven days dropped from 83% to 69%. (Barna)

Church membership dropped below 50% overall in this country around 2020. (Gallup)

You’ll be glad to know that conservatives and liberals have something in common: the percentage of both red and blue Americans who say they never attend church went up noticeably during the pandemic (American Enterprise Institute).

The Pew Charitable Trusts predicts that in fifty years, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians will drop to something between 54% to as low as 35%.  They put the most likely scenario at 39% of Americans calling themselves Christian in 2070.  That figure was about 64% in 2020.  In 1972 it was 92%.

Only 31% of Americans have confidence in the institutional church or organized religion in general (Gallup).

39% of Americans rate as “high” their trust in the honesty and ethical standards of the clergy.  That’s below nurses, doctors, school teachers, and cops.  But it’s a little bit better than ratings for bankers and lawyers; and significantly better than car salesmen and members of Congress.  (Gallup)

Only 20% of Americans consider the Bible to be the literal word of God (which is kind of a relief).  49% of adults are more comfortable calling the scriptures the “inspired word of God.”  But 29% are happy to call the Good Book an “ancient book of fables.”  Among adults with no religious affiliation (a number that is growing rapidly), that figure is, perhaps unsurprisingly, 65%.  (Gallup)

Europe is not doing much better than we are.  Only 60.2% of Spaniards - Spaniards! - said they were Roman Catholic in 2020. (Spanish Center for Sociological Research)

In Italy in 2014 that figure was still 83.3% (Pew Charitable Research).  But, you know, it’s Italy.

That same year, 2014, only 4.2% of the population of England attended a Christmas service in a church of the Church of England, even though 60% of Britons had identified as Christians in the census three years previously. (Wikipedia)  So you can see that just because people say they’re Christian doesn’t mean they go to church.  But we already knew that.

There are places in the world that the church is growing and faith is vibrant.  But by and large, you and I don’t live in those places or visit them often.  We certainly can’t really see them from here, so to speak.

I have been hearing for a long time that the church is dying, that faith is dying.  And there is plenty of evidence to suggest these possibilities.  Decline is all around.  From where I stand it is not hard to picture the church, or indeed much of the institutional construct of the Christian faith, as a valley of dry bones.  Talk about an ancient fable!  The prophet Ezekiel was active in the 6th century BCE, at the time that Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the Israelites were deported into exile.  Try convincing someone in that growing number of people with no religious conviction at all that anything Ezekiel has to say might be of importance to them!

If I was to try to take on that task, I think I’d want to point out that Ezekiel was trying to be brutally honest with the people.  It was important that in his vision, Ezekiel was led by the hand of the Lord to go around the valley so he could see the dry bones up close; he could account for how great was the number of the dry bones; he could see for himself that they were very dry.  This specificity was deliberate: he must know that the substantial demise of Israel was real.  The people had suffered, and much had been lost.  I suppose there were no statistics then, but if there were, I am sure that Ezekiel would have been given the numbers to contemplate.  And those numbers would have looked very bad.

And here is where the MIBS comes in.  For, once the Lord has set Ezekiel down in the midst of this valley of dry bones, and once he has made sure that Ezekiel can see how great is the number of dry bones, and that the bones are very dry, the Lord asks Ezekiel the question, which I now believe must rank among the top few questions of the MIBS.  Considering the statistics I have quoted you this morning, and their dire implications for the life and faith of the church - and I do mean dire - the question with which Ezekiel is confronted must be considered one of the most important questions in the Bible, especially if these words have anything to say to us today.

Here is the question Ezekiel is asked in the midst of that expansive valley of very dry bones: “Mortal, can these bones live?”

Mortal, can these bones live?

Uncharacteristically for a question on the MIBS, this one has an answer of sorts, that is provided by Ezekiel, who seems to understand the spirit in which it is being asked.  “Mortal, can these bones live?” asks the Lord.  And Ezekiel replies, “O Lord God, you know.”  Yes, Ezekiel understands the spirit in which the question is asked.  For the answer is about to be shown to him, when the Lord tells him what to do next.

“Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

So Ezekiel does as he was commanded.  He prophesies, and there is the rattling and the commotion as the knee bone’s connected to the leg bone, etc, and the bones are covered with sinews and flesh and skin, but alas, the prophet can see that “there was no breath in them.”  And what good are the reconfigured dry bones, and the bodies they have formed without breath?

So the Lord tells Ezekiel what to do next: “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”

Doing as he is told, Ezekiel prophesies to the breath.  “and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.”

But God has one last prophecy for Ezekiel to make.  And he leaves no doubt as to the meaning this vision is meant to convey.  “‘Mortal,’ God says, ‘these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’”  It’s like they had been reading up on statistics!  It’s like those old bones had been drying out in the sun for a moment such as the very moment we are living through today, when nothing but demise is all around, and no sensible person could believe that those dry, old bones would ever have life in them again.  Our bones are dried up!  Our hope is lost!  We are cut off completely!  These are the conclusions that the statistics I quoted you are meant to convey - near enough to completely!

It’s important to know that we can see a valley of dry bones before us.  It’s important that we can see the dry bones up close; that we can account for how great is the number of those bones; that we can see for ourselves that the bones are very dry.  This specificity is deliberate: we must know that our substantial demise is real.  The church has suffered, and much has been lost!  And it’s important to hear the question: Mortal, can these bones live?

But it’s also important to hear the answer that comes in the final prophecy that Ezekiel is told by the Lord to declare:

“Prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back….  And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.

No one needs a preacher to explain to them what the meaning of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dry bones means.  Anyone can see and hear the promise of hope that it is meant to convey: a hope that springs from the driest wilderness.  No one really even needs a preacher to identify the importance of this great question: Mortal, can these bones live?  No one really needs the MIBS.

But what the church needs right now, is to know that the question is being asked of us today.  Possessed of the long memory of the valley of dry bones, and the flesh and the sinews and the skin, and the breath that came from the four winds, and the promise from the Lord God himself that “I will put my spirit within you and you shall live!”  …what we need to know is that the question is meant for us today - mortal, can these bones live? - and that God’s promise to his people in their desolation has not expired, even when we think perhaps we have!

If it’s statistics you’re looking for about the decline of the Christian faith and religion in America, you will have no difficulty finding them.  If it’s dry bones you are looking for, I know a valley full of them that I can show you!  But there’s a question that echoes through that vast, dry valley: Mortal, can these bones live?

And it was not the prophet’s power that gave answer to that question; it was the power of the Lord God; it was the power of the Spirit; it was the power of the breath of God: “I will put my spirit within you and you shall live!”

Oh, we know the question: Can these bones live?  And we know how dire a question it is.  But do we not already know the answer to this question, my brothers and sisters in the Lord?  Have we not already heard the promise?  And do we not already know that God is faithful, and that he keeps his promises?  Did not the house of Israel find out that God would keep his promises and restore them to Jerusalem?

There is a valley of dry bones before us.  I see it in the statistics that are everywhere.  And the bones are very dry.  And I hear the question, don’t you?  Mortal, can these bones live?

And thanks be to God, we already know the answer, after some flesh has been put on those bones, and after the breath of God has come into them by the four winds; we know the promise God made, and still makes to his people:

“‘O my people, I will put my spirit within you and you shall live! …then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,’ says the Lord.”

Pile up all the statistics you want, leave them out in the sun to become very dry and then ask yourself, or if you don’t feel ready to answer for yourself, ask me:  Mortal, can these bones live?

“Oh my people, I will put my spirit within you and you shall live!”

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
26 March 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia

Gustave Doré: the Vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones