The Feast of St. Mark
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of St. Mark 2021, by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
Happy Feast of St. Mark! As you know, St. Mark is often figured as a lion. Tradition has it that that’s because Mark’s Gospel, beginning as it does without preface or preamble, announces the Gospel of Jesus Christ like a lion’s roar. No muss. No fuss. Rather like a community theatre production of Hamlet (perish the thought) where the curtain rises and the set is still being rolled into place, everyone is arranging their costumes and stuffing their scripts into their back pockets. Mark’s choice of this way of beginning is deliberate, considered, and artful--it’s meant to drive home to us the radical nature of the new regime that Jesus as boundary-crossing love, radical welcome, and indiscriminate hospitality inaugurates. It represents a break, a tear, a rupture in the ordinary way of things--a world turned upside down by love, a change of regime from the world where holiness is earned, where there are insiders and outsiders, clean and unclean, those on the top and those on the bottom. It smacks you, as my children would say, upside the head.
All of which put me in mind of that passage from C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian.
“Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger".
"That is because you are older, little one" answered he.
"Not because you are?"
"I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
Aslan, of course, is the Christ figure in Lewis’ Narnia series. Normally, when we get older people, places, and things seem smaller than when we were children. I remember going back to my childhood home to look in my bedroom and being shocked at how small it was. It was the largest in the house besides my parents’, and yet it appeared so tiny. The gaping crevasse between desk and bedpost across which my GI Joe’s zip-lined now appeared as just a few short paces. And yet, things are reversed in the kingdom of Narnia. As Lucy grows, Aslan, Christ, grows. He gets bigger as she gets bigger. What’s happening?
God is happening. Christ is happening. The Holy Spirit is happening. When that pronouncement of our belovedness rips through the dark clouds of our shame, our fear, our lostness, our isolation, our not-enoughness, our unlovableness and we know ourselves as beloved children of the Most High, it’s like olive oil poured in the center of a linen napkin. The stain spreads out. Soon enough the entire napkin is saturated. Aslan gets bigger. What started out as a whisper heard only fleetingly in the sound of sheer silence--you are beloved--gains in voice and strength until it more closely resembles a lion’s roar. Those other voices--you’re not rich enough, smart enough, straight enough, gay enough, skinny enough, kind enough, holy enough--might not ever go completely away (at least they haven’t for me), but they are now but mute gnats compared to the lion’s pronouncement of our unconditional acceptance, our belovedness, just as we are.
We often talk of things like “growth in Christ,” as if it were some kind of human work, something we do to get bigger. But isn’t it really more about letting Christ grow in us? Surrendering to love? Letting the stain of our belovedness saturate every nook and cranny of our being, each moment of our lives, and every encounter? The oil is already poured on the napkin--Christ dwells in the center of our being--all we have to do is not rush to the kitchen sink and start scrubbing away at the indelible spot. All we have to do is allow it to spread, to consent to God’s presence and action in our lives, to let love love us into loving so that we can be that love for others.
I remember when our girls were first learning how to swim the first thing the long-suffering instructor “taught” them to “do” was float. What was so interesting was that they could do it for a few seconds and they would freak out and start thrashing about and soon enough end up with a nose full of over-chlorinated water. They had to learn that struggling to stay afloat was the very thing that prevented them from floating. Efforting, doing, trying hard to float perfectly, comparing oneself to how others are floating, had to be seen as the very opposite of what was asked--to just let go, let be, surrender to water and discover their natural buoyancy. No matter what--whether you are young or old, skinny or stout, sick or well, happy or sad, rich or poor, black or white or brown or yellow--human beings float. There aren’t good floaters and bad floaters. You can’t perfect floating. You can’t write complex treatises on floating (although I’m sure someone has!).
So it is with the love of God. It’s free, unearned, and unmerited. It’s given as sheer gift. It just is. No one is more beloved of God than anyone else. Just because the Prodigal Son is beloved of the Father doesn’t mean that we as older sons are not beloved. Each person, each tree, flower, bird, subatomic particle, is held, sustained, showered with the full measure pressed and overflowing of God’s grace. To return to our lion roar metaphor, that voice of our belovedness is already roaring itself in our hearts. All we have to do is unstop our ears, unhook from those babbling heathens in our small, contracted, thinking self who tell us we’re not enough, and accept our acceptance, open to spaciousness, surrender to love, stop bothering ourselves and let ourselves be. We stop trying to manipulate, control, manage our experience and let everything be just as it is. We rest. We hang loose, let go, let be. And what we discover is, lo and behold, we’re floating! We are held, embraced, sustained, by the oceanic buoyancy of God’s love. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Each of us in our unrepeatable uniqueness loved into loving. My pointy-nosed, baldheaded, recovering Canadian love won’t look like yours. And that’s the point. Violets bloom as violets and roses bloom as roses. The point isn’t for a violet to spend its whole life wishing it were a rose or vice versa. Surrendering to love, opening and allowing, letting that stain saturate us, being roared by love into the fullness of who we were created to be is why we’re here. An endless, unquantifiable diversity of gifts and talents touched by love to serve as God’s hands and feet in the world.
2020-2021 marks the 150th anniversary of the Cathedral, 150 years of knowing Christ and making him known in the world, 150 years of being loved into loving and being love for others. As I mentioned at the annual meeting, our theme for this anniversary year is “Becoming the Beloved Community,” and some of the outward and visible signs include reducing our carbon footprint by installing a solar array, an upcoming lecture series on Racial Reconciliation, and collaborating with local community partners in the creation of a housing community for those experiencing homelessness. Global, national, and local. Christ’s work through our hands in each of those dimensions. But all of that hinges on the personal, interior (if you like), experiential encounter with the transformative power of the love of God in the depths of the heart of each and every one of us. If a solar array, a lecture series, and a community housing project are sacraments--outward and visible signs--that means they are outward and visible signs of something: an inward and spiritual grace. And what is that inward and spiritual grace? The grace of belovedness, the grace of God’s love cracked open and poured out over God’s good creation, over God’s people regardless of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, over the last, the least, the lost, and the left behind.
But again if that stunning reality is to be realized, manifest in our lives, in our actions, in our relationships, it needs to be personally encountered. There needs to be an encounter, a meeting, between ourselves and God, between ourselves and the Ground of Being. Without that our good works in the community are just ways to bolster our image in the community, another form of “virtue signalling” done out of fear of being cancelled, another form of “being on the right side of history” where we perform what we think love looks like without having the experience.
That’s really what the Church is for, our only reason for existing, why we talk about the way of love and forming disciples, why we have Sunday mass, morning and evening prayer, quiet days, bible study, Godly Play for the children, a food bank, adult formation, a theological reflection on short fiction class and all the rest. St. Mark’s true purpose is to be a gateway to intimate encounter with the Living God whose lion’s roar of belovedness cuts through our shame, our blame, our pain, our isolation, our loneliness, our circumscribed bubble of concern, our fear. We exist to teach people who they already are, who God already is in the depths of the heart and walk with them into a life of compassionate flourishing. We exist to teach people to float. To stop the struggle. To let go and let be and leave everything as it is and there in that space of openness, spaciousness, of Love with no bounds, to float, to come home, to be held, to behold. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). As St. John of the Cross writes in the Canticle of Love:
O most beautiful of creatures, transcendent spirit, who long to know where your beloved is and where you may find him so as to be united with him. He dwells within you. You are yourself the tabernacle, his secret hiding place. Rejoice, exult, for all you possibly desire, all your heart’s longing is so close, so intimate as to be within you; you cannot be without him.
Becoming the Beloved Community begins with entering God’s secret hiding place, knowing ourselves as the tabernacle, being roared wide open, home free safe and sound by Christ and from that encounter being that roar outside these walls. Aslan getting bigger and bigger each day.