SOW YOUR TEARS
The Rev’d Phillip Channing Ellsworth, Jr. 
17th December 2017, 2nd Sunday of Advent
Based on Psalm 126

“Do you know a cure for me?"
“Why yes,” he said, “I know a cure for everything. Salt water.”
“Salt water?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
                                                         ― Karen Blixen, Seven Gothic Tales

From Psalm 126: “Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.” May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We received guests this week. Paramount Pictures was here to shoot on location scenes for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. John Karl Hirten has a screen credit. He played the organ for the Ave Maria scene in Prizzi’s Honor. I have no screen credit, but my first cure, St Bartholomew’s in the City of New York, has been the location for a number of movies. In Arthur, Dudley Moore finds his bride in the cloister, before the start of their wedding, to say that he can’t go through with it. In what becomes a vacant church, he and Liza Minelli have a heart-to-heart talk sitting on the chancel steps. In SALT, the Russian President is eulogizing a U. S. Vice President when Angelina Jolie (Evelyn Salt), with a shaped charge, takes the gorgeous mosaic floor of that chancel out from beneath his feet and shows him his walking papers. 

A film shoot at your church doesn’t happen every day. Thursday a woman called the office to give me a piece of her mind about this one. She said she was a neighbor, not a parishioner. She called to ask, “Why would you let 13 Reasons Why roll cameras at your church?” She had watched the entire first season with her teenage daughter and had pigeonholed the message of the show. “It’s okay to take your life and to take revenge on people afterward. How could you let your church be associated with a message like that?” I listened to Ramona*, gave her the respect my parents raised me to show anyone, thanked her for calling me directly to express her disturbation, and left her feeling as if her questions were unanswered. I don’t assume that just because somebody asks a question, they deserve an answer. 

At the end of her call she said, “I assume your church made money from having Netflix shoot there, that you profited from it.” Then she delivered her parting shot. “Whatever you made off the filming of that show, I think your church should donate every dollar of it to a local suicide prevention center.”

Bless her heart. People are never more sanctimonious than when they think they know better how to spend someone else’s money.

I didn’t tell Ramona what I do tell you with candor. St Stephen’s Church is a suicide prevention center. Every bit of the Paramount proceeds went into the general operating fund of the best one I know of. You’re sitting in it. You gather here to pray for and be girded with divine strength to help those you love, including those who suffer in body, mind, or spirit. That same help you need yourself, and so do I.

St Stephen’s does life-giving work. It strengthens young people to withstand the withering social climate they live in, to learn to survive with their anxiety and sadness, and to do more than that, to strengthen their classmates to survive and so strengthen others in turn. Student Ministry here is rapidly becoming what it will be, with your continued support: the best in the Diocese of California. Our Director of Family Ministry, David Hirsch, possesses remarkable gifts. He knows what he’s doing. He’s here not to skirt around but address head on the cruelty and bullying faced by middle and high school students in Belvedere, Tiburon, and southern Marin.

This building has a public ministry. It is consecrated to be a sacred space where people, even fictional people now, go to bury their dead, to ask for mercy and help from the source of all loves, and to pray for the grace and the hearts to be kind to the living. If it’s a scandal to be associated with suicide, with saying “Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them,” then I put my neck in that noose on the Feast of the Epiphany 1996 when I was ordained a priest at St Bartholomew’s.

People can help it if they marry. They can’t help it if they die, whatever the cause of death. St Stephen’s welcomes whoever presents themselves and welcomes them as the Christ. And for that, for being generous in welcome, we make no apology. 

On Pledge Sunday I told you stories about Danny Parish, my best friend when I was a young teenager; how we found $50 in the street and, inspired by his mother Lois, gave it all away; how we won the New Mexico doubles bowling championship; and how nearly thirty years after having lost touch with him, at last I got his brother on the phone, made small talk, then dropped the shoe Jimmy knew would drop. “How do I get in touch with Danny?” I asked, and he said “Danny passed some years ago.” I didn’t tell you then what I tell you now. Danny took his own life. He hung himself. How unutterably sad that made me and makes me still. It’s quixotic, I know, but I am haunted by the question: Would fates have been different had we kept in touch? Would that we could toss a football, tell old tales, and laugh at the same nonsense we laughed at all those years ago when we were boys.

Today is Gaudete (‘Rejoice’) Sunday, Rose Sunday, and everything I have just told you is my way of asking you to do something, for yourselves and for each other: Be good stewards of your pain. Don’t hide it, don’t pretend it never happened because it is too hard to deal with. The world wants us to do things that way, to cover it over. “Don’t talk about the things that cause pain. Don’t provide a place for them. Bury them out of sight and off camera. People might get ideas. Keep them hidden.”

You can survive in this world by burying your bad times. But you pay a terrible price for that, because a certain part of you stops growing in the direction of compassion and wisdom. So keep in touch with your pain because it is often when we’re in hard times that we’re most alive. It’s when you’re afflicted that you’re most aware of your own powerlessness, crushed by what is happening to you, but also most aware of God’s power to pull you through it, to be with you in it. Be good stewards of your pain and of your joy, because they both come from the same place. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

*Ramona is not her real name.