It All Started With A Monk: A Reprise

It’s ok to admit it this morning: Reunion Weekend is overwhelming.  It is dizzying and confusing, wonderful, and sometimes terrifying.  Some people are so confused they didn’t even make it to chapel.  You would not believe the signs of disorder and chaos that I have seen on this campus on Sunday morning at the end of Reunion Weekend, as I make the slow walk up to St. Joseph’s Chapel.  For those of you who did make it to the Memorial Eucharist, congratulations (you get extra credit): and I hope to speak to the confusion this morning.  My own vantage point is mostly stationary.  I work here, I live here; this is my home.  I don’t have a plane to catch, a suitcase to pack, or a dormitory room to vacate.  But the emotions that are stirred up by this weekend for me are always significant, and deserve theological consideration.  Where is God in all of this?  Right in the middle of it--ok, but where is the middle?  What does the sacred center look like?   

It doesn’t matter what year you graduated, there is a feeling of many times in your life coming together right now.  Many people and storylines are regathering, and reconnecting.  Different times in your life are coming up to greet you.  Do you remember who you used to be?  Things that had grown old are being made new.  How will Kent shape you again?  From a theological perspective, it were as if our arms were so full of memories, that something must give way.  What should we hold onto?  What is it now ok to let go of?    

Several years ago, as I was preparing for this very service, I received some visitors.  Three monks from the Order of the Holy Cross came to pay me a visit.  Brother Robert, Brother Julian, and Brother Daniel came to visit the school founded by Father Frederick Sill, a monk from the same order, one hundred and eleven years ago.  Walt Disney, who is one of my personal heroes, was fond of summing up all of his movies and theme parks and lives touched with the simple statement: It all started with a mouse.  Somehow this simple phrase centered him, and humbled him as his work went in surprising directions.  It gave him the right perspective to take it all in.  Well, at Kent School, it all started with a monk.  I thought of our history as the three monks and I said a prayer at the grave of Father Sill, just outside this chapel in the garden.  The three monks and I toured the campus on a rainy day with something like this simple phrase in mind.  It all started with a monk.  A monk who certainly had no vision of his school eventually having a campus for girls, or a consolidated campus with boys and girls together.  God help us.  Yet it has all come to pass.  The entire history of Kent is an exercise in faith, and we’re all part of it.  The occasion of the monks’ visit was the founding of another school by the monks of Holy Cross: this time in Grahamstown, South Africa: Holy Cross School.  As Kent was once founded for young men of modest or slender means, Holy Cross is attended by some of the poorest children on the Eastern Cape of South Africa, in a region ravaged by AIDS, and poverty.  The most pressing needs for these children are medical care and education, and the school is adding a new grade each year.  As we walked the campus of Kent School under school umbrellas, Brother Robert Sevensky, the Superior of Holy Cross, remarked: “Just look at this place.  Imagine what Holy Cross School will be like in a hundred years.”  With Grahamstown and its little school in mind, the complicated feelings and experience of this weekend became incredibly simple: education is the best way to change the world, one person at a time.  And the quickest way to change the world is to change your own heart.  It all started with a monk.  And it is happening again.         

Sometimes the lessons on Sunday can also help to simplify things on Reunion Weekend.  Like the weekend itself, the story of an unnamed woman anointing Jesus can be incredibly complex and overwhelming.  So how should we approach this story from Luke?  In our shared history of Kent, it all started with a monk.  In the lesson from Luke, it all started with a woman.  It is a story that combines overwhelming gratitude, forgiveness, and healing, with a scandalous intimacy at a dinner party.  Jesus is anointed with holy oil, but, more importantly, with the tears and hair of the woman.  Jewish men and women who did not know each other generally didn’t speak in public at this time; they certainly didn’t touch each other.  In the anointing, the oil and tears mingle on the feet of Jesus, and she wipes his feet tenderly with her hair.  Everyone is scandalized by this woman.  Everyone except Jesus.  He is touched, literally, emotionally, and spiritually.  It is easily the most loving thing that is done to Jesus in his recorded ministry.  Jesus is usually the one giving love, even unto the cross.  Here he receives love, without shame.  It all started with a woman.  The woman is unnamed by Luke; or is she?  Many scholars, including me, believe that Luke is presenting the anointing tradition of Mary Magdalene, who is introduced immediately following the scandalous dinner party.  Who was this remarkable woman? 

Getting to know Mary Magdalene is like jumping into one of the most mysterious rivers of our tradition.  And the church has been little help in finding, let alone navigating, this river--because the current is so strong.  Let’s begin with background on the Marys we think we know, but haven’t ever really met.  As Mary his mother gave birth to Jesus’s life, Mary Magdalene was the mid-wife of his death: the one who anointed Jesus before his crucifixion.  However, this would be following solely Luke’s gospel, and only by a logical leap: “And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.”  The woman is unnamed in Luke, but, as mentioned, Mary Magdalene is introduced at the beginning of the next chapter (which the church specifically includes in today’s gospel text).  Mary is described as a woman of means, a wealthy woman and patron, not as a prostitute, or even as a sinner.  In no biblical tradition is she described as a prostitute. 

The proximity of the woman who is a sinner (still not necessarily a prostitute) to Mary Magdalene in the text of Luke provides the connection; they must be the same woman.  Mary Magdalene, the woman who is a sinner, is then the one anointing Jesus so intimately.  This connection was first made official by Pope Gregory in the sixth century; there is no proof for it.  But, lost in the sound and fury of Mary Magdalene’s alleged status as the woman who is a sinner, is the fact that Matthew, Mark, and John all agree that Jesus was anointed by Mary before his death.  But she was not Mary Magdalene.  It was more likely Mary of Bethany because the anointings all take place at Bethany.  This is the sister of Martha and Lazarus; she has a few stories.  Only John’s woman is explicitly Mary of Bethany in his anointing at Bethany.  A logical assumption would then be that Luke’s unnamed woman is also Mary of Bethany because it follows the same structure of the anointing scenes of the other three gospels; it just doesn’t locate it specifically at Bethany.  Despite the overwhelming agreement of three gospels, and the anonymity of Luke’s woman, the anointing tradition is most often associated with Mary Magdalene.  What is happening here?

The tradition of anointing the human body was not embraced by the early church, and there is a great deal of mystery surrounding Mary Magdalene as a result.  Bruce Chilton, a Religion professor at Bard College, and also an Episcopal priest, attempts to rectify the repression of this remarkable woman in his biography of Mary Magdalene.

“Mary and her nameless colleague in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel both show what other ancient documents demonstrate: Women in Jewish antiquity, particularly within the folk wisdom practiced in Galilee, exercised a prominent role as anointers.  Their domain extended far beyond the conventional household, and there is evidence that significant groups of practitioners looked to these women to guide them in their quest to leave this world behind them and experience the divine world.”

Mary Magdalene’s suppression as an early leader in the church, which she was, as well as the first apostle—the first witness to Easter resurrection in the gospels, which she was, is likely the result of the early church’s discomfort with physical anointing.  There is an unhidden element of eros in all four gospel traditions with the woman anointing Jesus with oil from the alabaster jar, not to mention the unseemly tears.  And the hair.  For his part, Jesus is not embarrassed by it; he is instead deeply moved by the woman’s love and tender devotion.  But the male witnesses are quite alarmed.  In all but one case, they are too disturbed to even name the woman directly.  They knew exactly who she was.  The four evangelists share the taboo panic with the witnesses; or rather they project it on to them. 

The scenes with the anointing woman show that the evangelists and the early church were uncomfortable with powerful women anointing others as a spiritual practice of the church, yet it was too important for them to fully cover it up.  So it’s there, but very confusing.  Jesus also approved of it; all the gospels agree on that point, however reluctantly.  Despite this institutional discomfort, the church has retained the remnant of the anointing tradition in four of its seven sacraments: Baptism (with the chrism, the oil anointing the forehead), Confirmation, Holy Orders, and Last Rites, with the laying on of hands.  The hidden history is actually in front of our eyes, hiding in plain sight, in the sacraments of the church.  What a strange way for an institution to continue its past while repressing the mystical female tradition of Judaism and the early church, and completely forgetting its first priestly practitioners.  This is a mighty river with no name.  It deserves one.

We often think of the love of God, the wisdom of the divine, coming directly from Jesus into the world.  In this moment of time, Jesus stops in his ordinary rounds to receive God’s love from someone else.  There is no moment quite like it anywhere in the gospels.  Jesus received the anointing tradition, a priestly ritual, from a woman, but it was no dry formula.  It is a personal religion, overflowing with love, with appreciation, with gratitude.  With tears.  The God in Mary Magdalene meets the God in Jesus Christ.  When we live in gratitude, to our school or to our families, we are capable of giving God’s love to each other--even giving it back to Jesus, with our names, our lives, our tears.  We are not passively receiving God’s love, we can also give it back.  We were all given the gift of life.  How we live it is the gift we give back to God.  Your life is a sacred story. 

May God bless you, your families, and all the lives you touch with your own. 

The Beauty We Love

The beauty of Kent in spring is now on full display, especially on Friday.  How does this happen every year?  Spring seems like miracle.  Should we be burning incense to Persephone?  Should there be a sacrifice to perform to receive the grace and beauty of spring?  I remember winter.  Nature all around us is both obvious and mysterious, as we ponder the source of life in the midst of blessing.   

            The obvious and the mysterious are also here in Henry’s baptism.  Henry Copland Sullivan.  The love of the parents for the child is obvious; it is overflowing; it moves powerfully like the tide.  Parental love is one of the most powerful forces of love we ever encounter.  When my children were born, I felt enormous love being pulled out of me, naturally, spiritually, emotionally, and it hasn’t stopped.  Not ever.  But in the life of Henry…there is mystery, in the twists and turns to come, in the decisions and choices of his life, in the ups and downs.  His life will include religious faith by the events we perform together on this day.

The gospel this morning from Luke is the road to Emmaus.  The road to Emmaus is a beloved story among the resurrection appearances, and it too is both obvious and mysterious.  These are not the main disciples of Jesus in the story, and only one of them is even named as Cleopas.  But the story strikes an important chord in the Easter imagination.  The stranger who joins them is the risen Jesus, but they fail to recognize him in their grief.  Jesus walks with them; he teaches them about the Scriptures.  They talk to him about the crucifixion and about the wild news of the empty tomb.  Jesus opens their eyes to the resurrection of their leader, but they still fail to see that is Jesus himself walking with them on the road to Emmaus. 

            The search for new life is not an easy one, as seen in this gospel story of non-recognition.  It can be hard it is to see what’s right in front of you.  The theme of non-recognition is the major one for Luke on the road to Emmaus.  What does it mean to be with Jesus and not recognize him?  Does this still happen with religious experiences of God and Jesus?  I think it happens all the time.  Non-recognition is the story of my life, maybe yours too.  I often don’t recognize people.  Sure, I may know their names, but that doesn’t mean I really see them.  And that doesn’t mean they really see me.  Sometimes weeks can go by without feeling really seen for who you are.  We walk around each other, we talk to each other, but that doesn’t mean we know each other.  This should be true in September, but not in May with five weeks left of school.  You could be Jesus—I could be Jesus, but something holds us back from really seeing each other.  The quick labels that we have don’t actually help us in the area of recognition; we put people into our categories and imprison them there. 

The mysteriously hidden Jesus teaches about the Bible and makes the purpose of his life and death obvious to his listeners.  I can read pages of a text without actually understanding or remembering a thing.  I’m sure this has happened to you.  Maybe it happens to you every night when you study.  We don’t read the world very well, and this keeps us in the dark when it comes to Jesus and the love of God.  Resurrection is about waking up, seeing the big picture, but something is always holding us back.  Something is causing the non-recognition.  Cleopas and the unnamed disciple have absorbed the events that led to the crucifixion of Jesus, but they are unready for the good news of his resurrection.  They cannot recognize Easter joy.  They don’t even see Jesus with them until they break bread at the end of the day.  Then their eyes are opened.  Then the risen Jesus is known.  The broken has become whole, the grief has become ecstatic.    

What does it mean to celebrate new life—to even talk about resurrection—when so many people in our world are suffering?  Suffering and pain can cause the non-recognition of God.  We prefer to stay in our pain or fondle our grievances then to wander into the new.  But Easter hope brings suffering and joy into a new mixture—a Loving God holds it all together for us, the tradition says.  Even when the disciples experience the Risen Jesus, it is clear that that the wounds of Jesus are real.  He really did suffer; it was no illusion, which was a source of debate in the early church.  So today, we celebrate new life on this third Sunday of Easter, not by isolating ourselves in joy from a suffering world, but by opening our hearts wider than they have ever been opened before. 

As I reflected on the paradox of new life and resurrection combined with the broken images of the world, I thought of the mystical poet Rumi, who is beloved by those of different faiths.  Rumi was a Muslim who lived in the thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan.  His poetry deeply investigates the paradox and mystery of God, especially the love of God that is found, surprisingly, in human suffering. 

Here are some samples of the spiritual wisdom of Rumi.  

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.

                        There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”



                        “Chase a deer and end up everywhere!” 

That sounds like my Native American Literature class.

                        “Mystics are experts in laziness.”

                       

                        “What have I ever lost by dying?”

“Because I love this, I am never bored.

Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of spring water

In my ear an inner being.”

“Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”

           

Even in the midst of suffering, there is treasure to be found.  As a Christian reading the mystical poet from Afghanistan, I can’t but help but be moved by his poetry about, and for, Jesus Christ; the way he comes to Jesus so personally, with fresh expression, and even with love.  Rumi was fascinated by Jesus, as many mystics from other religious traditions have been.  I have a brother who is a scientist, but he is keenly interested in theology and likes to ask me questions.  The hardest question that he once asked me: how come non-Christians often see Jesus more clearly than the Christians do?  I still don’t have an answer, but there is enormous reverence for Jesus in Islam.  The mystical experiences of God often obliterate, wonderfully, the boundaries that human beings hold most sacred, the ones that divide us; strangers and even former enemies can become friends and brothers.  When the Kingdom of God comes near, a full recognition can occur, a wonderful chaos can break out in human society.  The last become first, the first last, the poor hold spiritual riches, and the rich walk away empty-handed.  Rumi sensed the transformation and full recognition at the heart of Jesus’ life before God. 

This Jesus poem by Rumi is called “There’s Nothing Ahead.”

“Lovers think they’re looking for each other,

                        but there’s only one search: wandering

                        this world is wandering that, both inside one

                        transparent sky.  In here

                        there is no dogma and no heresy.



                        The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did

                        About the future.  Forget the future.

                        I’d worship someone who could do that.



                        On the way you may want to look back, or not,

                        but if you can say There’s nothing ahead

                        there will be nothing there.



                        Stretch your arms and take hold of the cloth of your clothes

                        with both hands.  The cure for the pain is in the pain.

                        Good and bad are mixed.  If you don’t have both,

                        you don’t belong with us.



                        When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.

                        There’s no place like that anywhere in the world.”

Jesus lived fully, completely, into both the beauty and the peril of creation, seeking out his neighbor in the least among us.  In him was the delighted mystic who lived each moment in the divine dance of creation.  God was so near to him that he called the ultimate reality Father or even Papa—his Beloved.  The Kingdom of God could be seen by Jesus in every human face.  That’s what it means to really see.  There is you full recognition.  Jesus chose as his discipline the Way of Transformation, the way of the heart in deep thanksgiving for every breath we take.  Sometimes a broken heart is the strongest thing there is. What is the new life, the great beauty, in front of you right now?  Go out and find it today; claim it for yourself.  Let the beauty we love be what we do.  There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Going Safely Through the World

The entry into Jerusalem by Jesus on Palm Sunday was a peak religious experience.  In the reading from Matthew, there is the sense of living religion, of faith coming to life in a radical new scene, one of power and majesty on this day.  Jesus literally comes down from a mountain—the Mount of Olives—to enter the great city of Jerusalem.  He is hailed as a king, and Matthew takes pains to present Jesus as a messianic king of old, entering the city with a donkey and a colt, as prophesied in Zechariah.  The gathered crowds also speak the language of royal power and divine blessing from the psalms as they hail Jesus, waving palm branches to the chosen one. 

            “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! 

             Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

The city of Jerusalem is alive with Passover preparation, the holiday of liberation for the Jewish people, and Jesus’s arrival adds to the drama and excitement, a city in turmoil.  But let’s go back to Jesus just before the powerful palm procession; as Jesus stood with his followers on the Mount of Olives.  He has a view of the entire city from an elevation of 3600 feet.  What a view.  What a moment to stand with him, with Jewish pilgrims gathering for the Passover celebration.  What must have been going through his mind as he saw the great city of his people?  In all of the gospels, Jesus predicted his death as part of God’s plan of salvation.  Yet he must have been torn, there on the Mount of Olives, before going down into the teeming city for the great holiday of the Jewish people.  There is a great tension here.  There is the holiness of the mountain peak experience, but what’s coming is the descent into humanity, and human problems and suffering.  There is hope in the panoramic vision—seeing the world as God might for a moment, but there is the darkness of human nature ahead in the events to come.  We have all felt holiness in the beauty of creation, but it’s always much harder when you go down from the mountain into human community. 

Our palm branches, like the ones waved to honor Jesus, signify a joyful fulfillment, yet they are also a transitory moment of glory where we rest in the eye of the hurricane.  Surely the greatest chapter of this teaching and healing messiah will unfold in the events in Jerusalem.  How we long to stay in the moments of triumph.  If you’ve ever had a great moment of success, the human desire is to stay there, not to move on. 

So, when Jesus goes down the mountain, he decides to enter into human suffering; he makes a decision to be a suffering messiah.  Or rather, he has made it all along.  On Palm Sunday, we want to linger in triumph, but how can we stay on the mountain when the panorama of this world is so filled with suffering?  Perhaps the great human success, the moment when we are at our best, is when we don’t celebrate, but rather embrace our neighbors in need.

For some of you, Palm Sunday and Holy Week are new experiences.  You’ve never been here before.  Never have you sat in church with a palm branch in your hand, as you wondered what was happening all around you.  Chapel is different today.  For me the liturgy of Palm Sunday and the events of Holy Week go far back in my life, to my earliest memories as a child.  I have been around this block a few times.  Yet there is something about the last week of Jesus’s life that is always daunting, and I want to linger with my palm branch and the triumphant journey of Jesus into Jerusalem. 

Despite all of the problems of the Church, there is something that I deeply appreciate about the millions of Christians who are doing exactly the same thing as we are on this Palm Sunday.  The Church for me has always been a place where death and suffering could be talked about.   And if you can talk about something painful, God can redeem it.  Extraordinary words have been said in chapel this year, and I don’t think they could have been said anywhere else.  We have needed chapel; we have made meaning, even when our hearts were broken.  And we gather together for Holy Week, seeking meaning, and experiencing forms of healing.

I mentioned that there is tension in the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.  Where does it come from?  The tension comes from the messianic expectation.  This was the common belief that a messiah would liberate the Jewish people from the occupation of the Roman Empire.  What kind of person could do this?  A political revolutionary, a warrior messiah.  The messianic expectation could not be clearer with the joyous greeting on the lips of the people.

            “Hosanna to the Son of David!

            Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

            Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

And yet Jesus rejected this messianic expectation for his entire ministry.  He is no warrior king who will overthrow the Roman occupation.  He’s not even close.  The values of humanity and the vision of God are in conflict, as they will be for most of this week.  We are called to go deeper into the mystery of suffering and how it gives birth to the Kingdom of God.  Holy Week is not about believing a series of creedal statements that leads one to the reality of God.  It is rather about the transformation of the heart, and an understanding of how to live in the moment with our humanity intact. 

I have recently been reading the work of Karen Armstrong, a religious thinker and former nun.  Armstrong made the decision to become a nun when she about your age.  She lived in a convent for seven years, and she was subjected to an extraordinary discipline designed to bring her closer to the Christian God.  She tried to believe all the doctrines of the Church; if she could do that, surely God would touch her life with his presence.  It didn’t work out that way.  She ended up leaving her religious order to study English Literature at Oxford.  She drifted away from God after the desert of her religious experience in the convent.  It wasn’t until she started to write about Islam and Judaism that she found herself drawn back to the life of faith.  Judaism and Islam are not creedal religions, and there is an openness about what one is to believe.  In Islam, there is only the Shahada which states: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his mouthpiece.”  That’s it.  And Judaism has no central creed.  These religions liberated Armstrong, and they showed her how to live faithfully, not by creeds, but by life practices and transformation.

In her words in her book titled The Spiral Staircase, subtitled My Climb Out of Darkness:

            “In the course of my studies, I have discovered the religious quest is not about discovering ‘the truth’ or ‘meaning of life’ but about living as intensely as possible here and now.  The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to ‘get to heaven’ but to discover how to be fully human—hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being.  Archetypal figures such as Muhammad, the Buddha, and Jesus become icons of fulfilled humanity.  God or Nirvana is not an optional extra, tacked on to our human nature.  Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves.  A passing Brahmin priest once asked the Buddha whether he was god, a spirit, or an angel.  None of these, the Buddha replied; ’I am awake!’  By activating a capacity that lay dormant in undeveloped men and women, he seemed to belong to a new species.  In the past, my own practice of religion had diminished me, whereas true faith, I now believe, should make you more human than before.”

 Holy Week is about escaping your mental prisons, not building them taller and wider.  As Bob Marley used to sing, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”  Most tangibly for me I remember experiences of success and failure and how to look at them from the eyes of God.  My life has not been one success after another.  My life has always included grief and failure, and I had to learn how to find the best of myself in adversity and sorrow.  I have made mistakes.  It is human nature to want to stay in the moments of triumph, like Jesus’s epic arrival in Jerusalem.  But life doesn’t work that way, and neither does God.  Rudyard Kipling put it this way in his poem called “If.”

“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;”

William Blake echoed this sentiment in his poem “Joy and woe are woven fine.”

“Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine,
Under every grief and pine,
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so,
We were made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.”

 Jesus didn’t fulfill the messianic expectation.  Jesus did something much more significant in his actions this week.  He went deeper, into the mystery of suffering; and into the mystery of God.  So, we follow in his footsteps, knowing that triumph and defeat are both imposters.  Palm Sunday is a moment of awakening, weaving our lives, our joy and our woe, with the love that God offers us now; that through the world we may safely go.     

The Mentor and the Messiah: Seeking a Newer World

               The gospel this morning from John depicts the early events in the ministry of Jesus.  The primary figure during this early period was John the Baptist.  You may remember John from the season of Advent, and, then again, you may not.  John was a radical prophet who left society to live in the wilderness.  People flocked to hear John preach and to receive the cleansing powers of baptism in the river Jordan.  His primary message was repentance of sin as he heralded the coming of God in new and powerful ways. 

               Like thousands of others, Jesus sought out John for his wisdom and the powers of his baptism.  Jesus had a teacher.  Jesus had a mentor.  It’s easy to miss this fact, but it’s right there in John’s gospel.  There is no biblical record of the influence of his father Joseph on the spiritual development of Jesus.  Here in St. Joseph’s chapel, we have a dedication of this chapel in the entrance to Joseph as the “foster father” of Jesus.  I love that.  We do know that Jesus was a carpenter, and he probably worked closely with his father in their trade.  But John is really the spiritual father of Jesus in the biblical record.  We often think of Jesus as having a static power before God—that he knew everything as the Son of God before he started his ministry that changed the world.  The gospel suggests otherwise as John’s witness pushed Jesus forward and inspired him as the messiah.  Here is John’s testimony that Jesus is the Son of God.

               “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him.  I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’  And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

             As I thought about John as a mentor to Jesus, I was reminded of a quotation from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman in his work Leaves of Grass.  It’s about how our mentors push us to go further because of their teaching.

“I am the teacher of athletes,

He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher…

I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?

I follow you whoever you are from the present hour,

My words itch at your ears till you understand them.”

This morning I’d like to share with you the story of my own John the Baptist, the one who came before me and set me on my spiritual path.  There are some people about whom you can say: Without this individual, I would not be here right now.  For me that person was my only mentor, The Very Reverend William Power Clancey.  He was a cathedral dean—a priest of the church--in San Jose, California, and he shepherded me through the process towards ordination in the church.  It’s actually a politically difficult process at times, and Bill got me through the ecclesiastical maze.  Bill Clancey—Father Clancey--was all about service: service to his country first as a marine, and later to the church as a priest.  Bill was a father figure to me when I desperately needed one.  He was also once a criminal lawyer for the Justice Department, along with being an Episcopal priest.  Powerful abilities and identities could be combined in a single individual; I learned that from Bill.  That was one of the many interesting things about him.  He had significant talents that were employed full time in helping others.  As a priest, he printed his pager number in the Yellow Pages.  Does anybody know what a pager is?  Probably not.  But it was high tech at the time.  Bill was nearly always on duty, ready to help a person in need.  The joke was that he would always beat the ambulance to the hospital.  But it was no joke to Bill.  Semper fi –always faithful--was a way of life for him as a former marine.  Former Marine: I love that term.  Some would say that there is no such thing as “former marine.”  You’re always a marine.  Despite his service in the church, he was also never a former attorney.  He was always a lawyer.  My understanding of my own calling as a priest, teacher, and writer didn’t seem so strange when I watched Bill in action.            

Help is the ordinary and extraordinary offering of the public servant; that your skills are to be used for the common good, not simply, or exclusively, for self-gratification and making money.  Jesus and John both practiced this vocation as a form of sacrificial love.  Bill was a lawyer and a marine and a priest all rolled into one, and he brought all of those experiences and abilities to the table.  He certainly gave away lots of free legal advice—hundreds of thousands of dollars of free legal advice.  He was a walking Legal Aid Society with a priest’s collar.  As a marine, he fought in two wars.  He was an enlisted man, fighting in the Pacific at the end of World War II.  He came back as a captain in the Korean War, and he actually volunteered for Korea.  He felt it was his duty.  After the first war, Bill excelled as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.  He called Berkeley “The People’s Republic of Berkeley.”  Even though he was a lifelong Republican, he always loved Berkeley, California: the largest open air mental health facility in the world, he called it.  Bill collected three UC Berkeley degrees, including a JD from Boalt Law School, and then another degree in divinity from the local seminary, where I also graduated.  Four degrees in Berkeley.  He worked for the Justice Department in Washington, and then as Assistant District Attorney of San Francisco.  Bill had mad skills, and he even had a cameo in the movie Milk when a real interview with him was placed in the documentary footage of the movie starring Sean Penn.  Bill once argued a case before the United States Supreme Court.  Of course he did this case pro bono.  That was his style, and he had plenty of it.  When you looked into the face of this tough, wiry Irishman, you could see the swift turnings of a highly intelligent and playful mind.  But you could also see the psychological scars of someone who had served in combat for years--and also the prosecutor who had sent people to prison, sometimes for life.       

Six years ago, at the beginning of 2011, just about now in January, I was aware that something was wrong, in my world.  There was some subtle change in the universe, like a change in the earth’s axis.  Yes, sure enough, my mentor had reached the end of his life—Bill had died.  He had “crossed the Jordan,” as Bill loved to say about the end of the journey for all of us.  He lived eighty-five years, and nearly all of that time was in public service: both military and religious.  Bill was an active e-mail guy, but he never made it to Facebook.  He was one of the lucky ones.   

Bill was born in 1926.  He was initially the golden boy of his Irish family.  However, a blot on his early record came when he was expelled from Milton Academy.  The expulsion charge was initially kidnapping.  Because the local bishop’s son had gone missing, the police had been alerted of a missing person--the bishop’s son was nowhere to be found.  Bill and the boy had just gone into Boston for an afternoon away from campus; they were playing hooky.  No one seemed worried about Bill being missing.  After all, he was just another Irish kid among the Blue Bloods of Boston.  When the boys were located back on campus that evening, kidnapping was dropped to mere truancy.  But it was enough to send Bill packing, and out to New Mexico to finish high school.  Throughout his life, he took pride in being the black sheep in his family.  But for Bill, all adversity was just grist for the mill; it could and should make you stronger, wiser, a better human being.  My theory is that it was at this moment of his development that Bill decided to be a lawyer.  He did not believe he had been treated fairly.  And he could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt in a real trial and not some prep school farce.  Bill loved a good legal battle all his life.  The man could cut through red tape like a flame thrower, and I believe he preferred defending to prosecuting (though he was equally adept at both), especially if he thought someone powerful had abused his authority.  Which happens often.  I don’t particularly like conflict, but Bill didn’t give a damn about ruffling feathers.  The world is full of injustice and mendacity.  If you want to do something about it, powerful people will not like you.  “Deal with it,” Bill would have said.    

As mentioned, I know that I would not be here today without his expertise and constant stream of advice and wisdom, sometimes more than I wanted to hear, usually right on the mark.  He knew I was a screw-up, but he brought something better out of my character, and for that I will always be thankful.  I literally would not be standing here in this pulpit, or working on this campus, without Father Clancey.  Bill was the person who taught me that you better have opinions, and you better be able to express them.  There is nothing noble in pretending to be wiser than you are; or just hiding, being aloof, hanging around, playing the game, and acting a part without intelligent engagement and conviction.  Bill would catch me, call me out, and challenge me to do better.   

His one liners still echo in my mind.  For a marine, he could be hilarious.  He was a man of ready, constantly streaming wit.  People who serve and protect this country include every kind of personality you can imagine.  Father Clancey taught me that our duty in life is to make a difference; to make a difference to each other. 

               Our teachers and mentors make us reflect on the past, but John’s gospel is not about the past.  It’s not about the future either.  It’s about the sacred now, the golden present.  My mentor is gone, but I carry him forward in my own life.  Is my advice for each of you to find a mentor among your teachers and coaches?  Yes, that’s part of my message.  But the other is to make the best use of your talents for the good of others, the betterment of our society and this world.  In the second half of the gospel, Jesus the student is now the inspired teacher, and disciples are flocking to him, as they once did to John.  They ask Jesus, “where are you staying?”  Jesus invites them with the words “come and see.”  Bill Clancey taught me about what to do with my life, but he did more than that by his example.  He showed me that my life is better understood as our one life together.  How is your future unfolding in the present?  What will you do with your time on this planet?  In the words of Jesus: Come and see. 

The Promise of God in the Wilderness

Last Sunday, while you were on your Thanksgiving break, the season of Advent began, and the first candle on our Advent wreath was lit.  Now there are two lights, the second Sunday.  Advent is a special season of watching and waiting; of looking for the subtle and surprising signs of God’s presence in the world.  I love Advent because it has a spiritual subtlety that is very necessary in the commercialized excess of the holiday season.  It reminds me that I could miss the presence of God if I’m not looking carefully for it.  Advent is about cleaning your lens and looking at the world in a new way.  And today we have a baptism for baby Charlotte to remind us of the beginning of life, and the journey of faith chosen by her parents.

Look around this morning.  Take a good look.  If you hadn’t noticed, this is the best time of year at Kent.  The best.  We should have signs put up, so you remember.  Instead, our Advent wreath hangs in the chancel, as a gentle reminder.  We’re half way through Advent, as we prepare for Christmas.  You may remember keeping an Advent calendar as a child.  Those were good times--a time of wonder, but the anticipation and beauty of the season are still here, reaching you in new ways if you stop to look around.  A strange thing happened to me earlier this week—something just felt wrong.  I was out of sorts.  And then I realized what I was missing.  I was here at Kent, but I wasn’t stressed out.  These two weeks are quite a few notches less stressful than any other time of the year.  It is a time to just be, or as close as we come to mindful relaxation.  And this time together doesn’t end with final exams, or the goodbyes of spring, but rather a chapel service, one that is different from the others.  People really sing the Christmas carols.  Vacation will hang in the air with the Lessons and Carols service, before we go our separate ways and rejoin our families for the holidays.      

One of the great figures of the Advent season is John the Baptist.  You heard him calling for repentance in the gospel reading from Matthew.  John the Baptist was a prophet, one of the most significant in our tradition.  He left society and lived in solitude, in the wilderness.  People had to leave society to find him.  John went off the grid to find God.  In solitude, he sought God with all of his heart, and society eventually followed him, seeking some small portion of what he had, that peace of mind that passes understanding.  He had many followers, including Jesus himself. 

The theme of the wilderness is a rich one in the gospels.  Like John, Jesus too sought God in the wilderness for forty days.  What would a modern-day John the Baptist look like?  What would it mean to leave society for the wilderness, even for a short amount of time?

As I pondered the questions, I thought of the writer Robert Sullivan.  Robert Sullivan is an explorer and writer, but not the usual kind.  His specialty is the Meadowlands.  Yes, that’s right, the Meadowlands in New Jersey: a former glacial lake that has been receding for the last 10,000 years, becoming the swampland you know now--and at one time the largest garbage dump in the world.  You’ve driven past it on the way to somewhere more important: Newark Airport possibly, maybe a discount mall, or you went there for a Giants or Jets game.  Robert Sullivan is obsessed with the Meadowlands.  Like Henry David Thoreau, he wanted to get back to nature, but he chose the most unlikely spot in the United States, maybe the world.  The comparison with Thoreau, however ironic in talking about an EPA waste site, became absolutely just when Sullivan found that the Meadowlands did, in fact, have a Walden Pond.  It’s just that no one ever went there; no one even looks at the map of the expansive swampland.  So Sullivan decided to go on his own Thoreau wilderness adventure, exploring the Meadowlands for weeks at a time in a small canoe.

Here is Sullivan’s adventure and vision in his own words in his book The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City.

“Sometimes, I sit on the top of Snake Hill until dusk, and I spread out my maps and marvel.  I marvel that I am in the middle of a thirty-two-square-mile wilderness, part natural, part industrial, that is five miles from the Empire State Building and a little bit bigger than Manhattan.

I marvel that the land before me was called ‘a swampy, mosquito-infested jungle…where rusting auto bodies, demolition rubble, industrial oil slicks and cattails merge in an unholy, stinking union,’ by authors of a 1978 federal report, and that now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-billed grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs, even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.

I marvel that on the edges of the Meadowlands there are places that are stuffed with people (some blocks in Union City have the highest population density in the United States) but that in the middle of the Meadowlands there are acres and acres of land where there aren’t people at all…

On the top of Snake Hill, I am on mysterious ground that is not guidebooked and that reads like a dead language…I am in the middle of a place that forces of progress have perennially targeted but have never managed to completely control, a place that people rush past on their way to the rest of America, a place they spit at with their exhaust pipes.  There, with the sun burning through smog and lighting up the reeds, with eight lanes of traffic providing backup, I sing the Meadowlands.  I am the dot on the Meadowlands’ exclamation point.”    

To go out in a search for peace and enlightenment in the Meadowlands of New Jersey is absurd—it’s completely crazy (which is exactly what Sullivan’s wife thought by the way).  But that’s what Robert Sullivan did, and that’s what he found.  All of the madness of our culture and world was right on the edge of a wilderness, almost totally unexplored.  That boggled Sullivan’s mind.  He found peace, renewal, and the unbelievable power of nature still pulsing in the Meadowlands, even as man’s so-called ingenuity is destroying our natural environment.  Mother Nature is still a very powerful lady.  Sullivan is a wise man of our time, finding renewal, inspiration, and peace in the last place anyone would look

The wilderness is spiritually lively, for both the ancient and modern seeker.  In his book Thoughts on Solitude, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer, wrote this about the wilderness in considering the Desert Fathers, the early Christians who left society to live in the wilderness in search of God.

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God because it was no value to men.  The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted because it offered them nothing.  There was nothing to attract them.  There was nothing to exploit.  The desert was the region in which the Chosen people had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone.  They could have reached the promised land in a few months if they traveled directly to it.  God’s plan was that they should learn to love him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

The wilderness comes in many forms.  Our founder Father Sill left his monastery on the Hudson River to go out into the wilderness to found a school, one that would be different from the other Eastern prep schools.  It would be a school for young men of modest means.  His initial fundraising efforts yielded a mere $300, but he kept going forward.  I can’t even imagine the number of times this school might have failed.  But Father Sill persisted, and I have no doubt that he believed he was guided by God.  All of the little details of running a school were put in the light of God’s guidance, including the construction of this beautiful chapel where students might learn about the ways in which we are always part of God’s plan.  Where an alumna’s child could be baptized today.  What a wonderful journey this school has had, and all of us get to play a part in a school that is now thriving.  We keep the fire burning.  It is humbling to be in this space together with the past in mind.  We should always look back to the wilderness of our origins as an idyllic time.  The wilderness is now a land of promise for all of us. 

Expect the unexpected during this Advent season, the best time of the year at Kent.  Where is the wilderness in your life right now?  Where is the neglected place that is alive with new interest?  What have you overlooked about yourself?  The promise of Advent is the promise of God’s love and presence among us.  It’s happening now.  May God bless us during this holy Advent season, that we might awaken to the voice of God calling us his beloved, and calling us home.