Sermons from Saint John’s

Lectionary Readings

After Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia, our political leaders restarted their recurring theological debate over the effectiveness of prayer and its importance relative to action in the face of the crisis of gun violence in America. I’m a little disturbed to admit that on before the shooting, on Tuesday afternoon, I spent some time with our reading from the Epistle of James and then sat down and wrote most of a sermon about the connection between early Christian debates over faith and works and the modern American debate over the use of the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” On Tuesday, it seemed like a decent way to connect the Bible to the real problems of our world. By Wednesday, I just felt sad, because the need for public figures to offer such thoughts and prayers over and over again is sad.

But here we are in church. And so I do want to begin not by offering my thoughts and prayers in the abstract, but by actually praying…

You’ve probably never heard a politician stand up at a campaign rally and declare, “Faith without works is dead!” (James 2:17) But the debate over “thoughts and prayers” pretty closely follows this other, theological debate over the relationship between two sorts of things that we sometimes shorthand by calling them “faith” and “works”. In both cases, it’s easy for things to become overly-abstracted into phrases like “justification by grace through faith” or “Second Amendment rights.” What I love about James is that he makes things very concrete. “If your brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’… What is the good of that?” (James 2:16) When you see someone cold and hungry and offer them a prayer for warmth instead of your spare coat, are you “loving your neighbor as yourself?” (Jame 2:15–16) James’s answer is simple: no, you’re not. Faith alone, without work—prayer, alone, without action—is dead.

James lists food and warmth. We might add safety to the list, and we might ask in James’s words: If a person offers prayers for our children to be safe, but does not use the power they have to make them safer, “what is the good of that?” (James 2:17)

I want to step back and provide some of the theological context for this debate over faith and works, words and action. It’s a debate that began in the early Church with the apostles James and Paul, was picked back up in Martin Luther’s criticism of the late-medieval Catholic Church, and has continued to the present day.

Indeed, you’ll sometimes hear James’s “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” countered with the words of the apostle Paul, when he writes, in his Letter to the Galatians, that “a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 2:16) This is part of Paul’s broader understanding of salvation. The requirements of the law are so strict, the burden of the law is so great, Paul suggests, that none of us can fulfill it. If God is going to judge us on how precisely we’ve followed God’s commandments, then we’re all in some serious trouble. But there’s good news, Paul says; we are “justified,” we are restored to right relationship with God, not because we’ve fulfilled every point of the law perfectly, but because we’ve put our faith in Christ. It’s Jesus who has fulfilled the law on our behalf; only Christ the King, Paul reply to James, can truly fulfill “the royal law of love.”

Of course, It’s easy to see how you could take this much too far. If we are justified by faith, and not by works, then why do good things at all? If we are all sinners in need of redemption, then we can excuse any amount of bad behavior, so long as the person later says that they repent. If we’re free from the law and we depend only on God’s grace, then why does it matter whether we act? God’s in charge. Paul himself rejects this misunderstanding. But it’s clear that many people took his wrods this way.

Paul is really writing against people who claim that Gentile converts to Christianity need to adopt all of the law, including practices of circumcision and kosher food regulations that essentially mean that they must first convert to Judaism in order to become Christian. James is really writing people who think they need to keep none of the law, not even to feed and clothe their neighbors. If they’d just sat down, you might think, they could’ve worked this out. And in fact, they did. Paul and James and Peter and John met up in Jerusalem, and they agreed that Gentile converts didn’t have to follow the whole body of Jewish law, as long as Paul and his followers agreed to remember the poor, and so it was: faith and works exist in a balance, although we’ve been arguing about the balance ever since.

Our tradition offers us a beautiful image for this relationship, right there in the Historical Documents section of your Prayer Book, in Article XII of the 39 Articles. These articles are the classic formulation of the Reformation-era faith of the Church of England, and while they don’t always capture our own lives of faith perfectly well, they’re full of little gems. Article XII says, “Albeit that Good Works… cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God’s judgment… yet are they pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ, and do spring necessarily of a true and lively Faith; insomuch that by them a lively Faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by its fruit.”

Elizabethan theological prose is not always easy to parse by ear, so let me explain. Our good works alone, the Article admits, cannot atone for sin. We cannot, by working hard enough, earn our way into God’s good graces. (And so God comes down, in Christ, to bridge that gap instead.)

Nevertheless, the Article continues with a very English kind of reasonableness. The good things we do are “pleasing and acceptable to God.” And more than that. They’re not just nice to have, they spring “necessarily” from a true and lively Faith. There is no stark conflict between “faith” and “works”; when a person is filled with faith, it inevitably bubbles up out of them in good works, such that that you can actually know a “lively Faith” by good works, just as you can know a living tree from its good fruit. And this is what it means that “faith, if it has no works, is dead.” Just as the lack of fruit on a tree might be evidence that the tree isn’t thriving, the lack of love and kindness might be evidence that your faith is dying. In a strange way, praying for something to happen and refusing to make it happen shows a kind of lack of faith; a lack of faith that God might answer your prayers through you.

There’s only one person for whom faith and works are the same, and it’s Jesus. Only for Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, are words the same as deeds. Only Jesus can say “you may go—the demon has left your daughter,” and simply make that true. (Mark 7:29) Only Jesus can simply say, “‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened,’” and open someone’s ears. (Mark 7:34) For Jesus, prayer is the complete action; for the rest of us, prayer is only the beginning.

So here’s your homework for today.

In a few minutes, we will offer our thoughts and prayers. We’ll pray for the Church and for the world in ways general and specific. We’ll pray “for the peace of the world,” and for specific nations engaged in war. We’ll pray for “the welfare of the holy Church of God,” and for people we know and love who are unwell. We’ll pray for the widowed and orphans, for the poor and the oppressed. And our prayers are good. Our prayers are worthwhile. But none of us is Jesus. None of us can just say “Ephphatha” and make it so.

So I want to invite you to pick one prayer that you’re going to turn into a deed; one part of your faith, from which a good work will spring. Pick one of the politicians we pray for today, and write them a letter about something that you care deeply about. Or pick one person on the prayer list, who you know well or not as well, and give them a call.

Not because God will condemn you if you don’t. Not because you will be justified by works of the law if you do. But simply because if our prayers are genuine, they should not end in our hearts, but should move us to do something with our hands. Because if we truly believe God is answering our prayers, we need to be ready to accept that we might be part of the answer.

Lectionary Readings

Well, it’s Labor Day tomorrow and only the real hard core has showed up to church today, so we’re going to have fun. I’m going to see if, in the next thirteen minutes or so, I can convince you to become full-on Bible-thumpers. In a way. My crazy proposition for today is this: Sometimes the only way to defend yourself against the moralistic criticism of the holier-than-thou is to know the Bible well. To put it another way: If someone’s trying to condemn you or control you in the name of God, sometimes the Bible is part of the problem; but often, it’s part of the solution, too.

And Jesus knew this well. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus confronts a group of people who try to use their own religious beliefs to condemn his disciples, and he doesn’t do it by backing off from Scripture. He does it by embracing what’s actually in the Bible; by insisting that if Scripture doesn’t require him to do something, neither can you, and thereby setting his disciples free from their demands.

This confrontation isn’t about any of the culture-war issues of our day. The Pharisees aren’t arguing with him about sexual orientation or gender identity, the ordination of women or access to abortion or any of the many other things on which churches today disagree. They’re attacking him because they see thatsome of his disciples are eating with unwashed hands.

This is not advice for your Labor Day barbecue. They’re not talking about washing your hands with soap and water before you cook or eat, to wash bacteria and dirt away. They’re talking about a ritual purification. In some later Jewish traditions, it takes the form of pouring water from a cup over each hand three times before a meal. It’s not about hygiene, but about purity.

The very fact that this practice existed, and was widespread enough that Jesus could be criticized for some of his disciples not doing it, reflects a trend in ancient Judaism of expanding the scope of purity laws from the Temple to daily life, from the holiest days to the everyday.

In the system of Biblical law in the Old Testament, “purity” is not a moral or an ethical status; it’s a ritual one. It’s not “wrong” to be impure. Sometimes it’s right, or even required. Impurity results from a wide enough variety of things that an ordinary person living an ordinary life should expect to be in a state of “impurity” with some regularity. And that wasn’t a problem. Purity was only required in the presence of holy things in the Temple, a place where most ordinary people only went for major holidays a few times a year. If you were just living in a village somewhere in Galilee, the whole system of purity laws meant you needed to immerse yourself in a ritual bath every once in a while, before the highest holy days. As far as religious rituals go, these purity regulations were not really a big deal.

Now, this is deeply dissatisfying to the pious religious mind. Surely, we devoted people tend to think, religion must be harder than that. If it’s good to be pure in the Temple, then it’s good to be pure all the time. And there’s clear archeological evidence that over time, these practices of purification took on a life of their own. We find ritual baths spread throughout the ancient Jewish world, even far from Jerusalem, and descriptions of purification that are detached from the Temple, as people who technically didn’t need to be “pure” began to practice ritual purification as part of daily life.

Handwashing is just a small example of this trend. It originates in a single commandment in Exodus that instructs the priests, the sons of Aaron, to wash their hands and feet before they go to the altar, to ensure that the hands that touch the holy food offered to God are not impure. (Ex. 30:17-20)  But like many pious practices, it expanded over time. If it’s good for the priests to wash their hands before they touch the food that will be sacrificed on the altar, isn’t it even better for us all to wash our hands before we touch food of any kind? It certainly can’t hurt.

And the context is important, too. Remember that Mark is writing down Jesus’ words a few decades after Jesus spoke them, most likely a few years after the Temple had been destroyed. When the rituals in the Temple could no longer take place, the rituals that had happened around the worship in the Temple began to take their place: and so as early Christianity began to emerge and separate from the rest of the Jewish society around it, these practices like handwashing became even more widespread, even though the reason for ritual purity to exist was no longer there.

Jesus didn’t mind, either way. Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples not to wash their hands before meals because in the Bible, that was only required of the priests. And you can tell this because the Pharisees’ concern is that some of Jesus’ disciples weren’t washing their hands, which means that some of them were. But the Pharisees come to Jesus and confront him. They ask, “Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7:5)

And that’s when Jesus gets a little mad.

“Now just you wait,” he seems to say. “Now I know who Isaiah was talking about when he talked about people who worship God in vain, ‘teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” (Mark 7:7) It was you! There’s nothing wrong with adopting some extra pious practice for yourself, but don’t you dare insist on it for everyone else. You can hear the echo of our first reading from Deuteronomy in Jesus’ mind: “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take anything away.” (Deut. 4:2) But the Pharisees have elevated their own traditions, which are fine in and of themselves, to the status of God’s own law.

And then Jesus goes on, turning things around with an accusation of hypocrisy. You, who are not priests descended from the sons of Aaron, follow commandments you don’t need to, in line with human traditions that say you should; but you abandon the commandments of charity and love. You lose sight of what it is that really defiles, he says: not impure hands touching food before it goes into our mouths, but impure hearts from which evil intentions come. I don’t know whether Jesus’ accusation is fair. Perhaps the Pharisees in front of him weren’t quite so bad as that. But he’s making a real point, recalling people’s attention to the commandments at the heart of what it is to follow God.

In this story, Jesus defends his disciples against a pious complaint by adopting a kind of strict Biblical interpretation. And he can only do this because he’s deeply familiar with the text. He knows where the commandment in Exodus ends, and where human traditions begin. He’s confident in quoting Isaiah off the bat. He doesn’t use this knowledge to condemn those of his own followers who want to adopt this special pious act. But he does use it to defend those who are under attack.

Jesus would make a darn good Episcopalian, I think. Or rather—we Episcopalians have a chance here, to become even better followers of Christ: to embrace and act upon our values of inclusion and love, not by shying away from the text of the Bible but by diving further in, by finding and learning

To take just one small example: Over the summer, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first ordination of women as priests in the Episcopal Church. For centuries, women’s ministry had been restricted to the ministry of laypeople; for more than a thousand years, women were told there was no place for them at the altar. Sometimes the Bible was quoted. Sometimes it was human tradition, whether religious sexism or misogynistic philosophy. But in fact, the Bible is relatively clear. Women played a leading role in the leadership of the early Church. Not only the women who followed Jesus to the tomb, and were the apostles to the apostles, the first ones to proclaim Easter’s good news. Not only the women like Lydia who led early gatherings of the disciples. But women who are given the titles of what would become ordained ministries, like “Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae,” (Romans 16:1), and Junia, who is “prominent among the apostles.” (16:7) It’s no surprise that it was the most Protestant churches, least bound to human tradition and most drawn to the Bible, who began ordaining women first, then Episcopalians later with our murky in-between, and who knows whether our more siblings in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, where tradition is elevated to the same level as Scripture, will ever allow the same.

So, okay: Maybe you’re not ready to Bible-thump quite yet. But I want to encourage you to read the Bible, at least; to mark, as one of our prayers says, and learn, and inwardly digest it; because it can be not only the source of inspiration, comfort, and strength; it can be the source of liberation too, as Jesus knew so well.

Lectionary Readings

There comes a point in every one of our lives when we must make a choice between two different paths. There’s no compromise, no way to split the difference. There are two roads laid out before us, one here and one there, and we have to decide which one we’re going to follow.

I’m talking, of course, about the difficult choice between following the road signs and the GPS.

Now, I drive a remarkably-reliable eleven year old car, which came with a wonderful but now quite unreliable built-in navigation system. It’s the kind of early 2010s device where if you want updated maps, you have to send away for a USB drive to plug in and update them, and I have to admit, I never have.

And so there are certain parts of certain routes where, a decade after installation, my GPS is just entirely wrong. Sometimes this happens when I know the route, as when the GPS tries to send me whirling around a rotary that no longer exists, somewhere in Somerville. It more often happens on some highway somewhere out of state, where the entry and exit ramps have moved around, and the GPS tells me to go straight for half a mile, then change between I-95 and I-91 by sailing off through the sky on a ramp that’s no longer there. (Which, to be fair, would not even be the worst driving I’ve seen in New Haven, Connecticut.)

Anyway, at those moments you face a choice between two different sources of authority offering two different visions of reality, and you need to choose which one to trust, and which one to follow. And in a way, this is what every one of our readings this morning is about.

Our first reading tells the story of the choice that Joshua offered to the ancient Israelites at the very end of their journey into the Promised Land. The people have crossed the Red Sea on their way out of slavery in Egypt, led by Moses. They’ve wandered forty years in the wilderness, complaining all the way, and Moses has seen the Promised Land from the mountaintop before he dies. Now Joshua has led them in, and they’ve battled with the people of the land. And years later, after a long time of peace, Joshua’s life is drawing to its end, and he gathers all the people and offers them a choice.

Remember the stories of your ancestors, he tells them: remember Terah and Abraham and Nahor, who lived beyond the river and served other gods. Remember their descendants, you parents and grandparents, the ones who were enslaved in Egypt, and served Egyptian gods there. Remember the gods your ancestors served, and how that went for them.

And remember the story of the God we now serve, and what that God has done for you. Remember how he brought your parents up out of slavery. Remember how he protected them through those long years in the wilderness. Remember how he led you into this Promised Land.

(And for this Sunday, at least, let me just acknowledge that the old stories of conquest and violence as the people came into the land have echoed down the ages, with very real effects. And let me say that if you’re curious about the intersection between these stories and Israeli-Palestinian relations today, I’m happy to talk about that any time; even though I’m not going to talk about it right now.)

So Joshua offers a choice between two ways: you can choose the gods your ancestors served long ago and far away, you can follow their traditions and practice their ancient rites; or you can choose the God who brought you up out of Egypt, and set you free. But one way or another you must “choose this day whom you will serve.” (Joshua 24:15)

More than a thousand years later, another Joshua arose, another leader among the people of that land. We tend to call this one what the Greeks and Romans called him. Their languages had no sh sound, and ended masculine words in s, and Hebrew pronunciation had changed as well, so they spelled his name not Yeshu’ but Jesus. In other words, we call him Jesus, but Jesus and Joshua are the same name.

And like that ancient Joshua, Jesus offered the people around him a choice; implicitly, this time, but a choice all the same. He didn’t ask them to choose between one god and another. Nearly everyone who appears in all the stories in the gospels was faithful to the one God of the Jewish people. Their choice, in our reading this morning, was whether they could accept the strange teachings of this man, the almost-grotesque idea that they should “eat [his] flesh and drink [his] blood,” which we talked about at some length last week. (John 6:56)

“This teaching is difficult,” his disciples said when he told them this. “Who can accept it?” (6:60) And it’s actually unusual, how this story goes. Here, it’s not “the Jews” or “the Pharisees” or “the Sadducees” who criticize Jesus’ teaching, as the various gospels often say. It’s “his disciples,” the people who’ve faithfully followed him so far. He teaches something strange and hard, and they complain. But Jesus doesn’t yield, he doubles down on his claims, and “because of this, many of his disciples turned away.” (6:66)

But a faithful remnant remains, a core group built around the twelve, the ones who we will come to call apostles. And they don’t stay, you might notice, because they think that this teaching is easy to believe. They don’t even acknowledge that what he’s saying might be true. They don’t stay because they accept his words. They stay because they believe in him. They trust him. And so, Peter answers on their behalf, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (6:68)

They’ve made the choice that he’s the one who knows how the right directions, and they’re going to follow him, wherever the rest of the traffic may be going. They’ve decided that, however strange some of what he says may seem, he is, to paraphrase what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel of John, not only “the truth” and “the life”; he is “the Waze.” (I’m so sorry. I am, in fact, a dad.)

So the disciples choose to follow Jesus. And they choose again to stay the course, to remain faithful when others back away. But it’s not until much later that the disciples feel what Paul calls “boldness.” It’s not until much later that their faith transforms from something that they have to struggle to accept, to something that gives them strength, a shield and helmet and armor that protects them from all the evils of the world. This “boldness” is one of Paul’s favorite words, and he means the kind of extraordinary strength it takes to stand up and declare the truth when it’s much easier to say nothing. To stand for what is good in a world that’s often beset by evil. And to remain not only confident in but comforted by what you know to be true, even when the people around you are shocked.

There’s a kind of growth in these stories, from decision to faithfulness to boldness. And you could imagine this as a typical trajectory in spiritual life. The story of your faith might have a beginning, when you make the decision to follow, the decision to choose which god to serve; when you choose who gets to be your judge and what values will shape your life. This is when you choose which way to go. The story might have a middle, in which your faith is tested; in which the road becomes more difficult, when you’re not so sure that your decision was right, or something unexpected happens, and you wish you’d gone the other way, after all. And then later, the story might end with a kind of boldness, a sense of certainty that you’ve gone the right way, and a comfort that the destination is finally in sight.

And yet the story of a life is rarely as simple as 1, 2, 3; decision, faithfulness, boldness. They’re not really three phases of a story, after all, neatly ordered in a row. They’re three episodes, three common patterns of life, that we cycle through again and again and again. It sometimes seems that every week or every month or every year, we have to choose to commit ourselves again to the things that we believe, and it can become a burden. But it’s also a gift: the fact that we need to choose again and again to do the right thing means that we get to choose again and again. We are given a thousand chances to follow in Jesus’ way of love, and when we choose the wrong path, it’s never too late to get off at the next exit, and take a U-turn, however inconvenient it may be.

Lectionary Readings

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says to the crowd who have come to hear from him, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (John 6:53) And over the course of history, down to the present day—perhaps down to this very morning—people have responded to these words in many ways. But there are three kinds of responses I want to talk about especially today, and I’ll summarize them as: 1) “So gross!” 2) “So great!” and 3) “So what?”

(As with anything a preacher says, this is a massive over-simplification. But you and I both know that, oratorically speaking, at least, things always go better in threes.)

So, first: “So gross!” In the Church today, we tend to use phrases like “receiving the Body of Christ” when we talk about Holy Communion. Jesus’ own language seems blunter, almost cruder. “Eat my flesh.” “Drink my blood.” That’s kind of gross!

You might think that there’s something lost in translation, here, of course, either linguistically or culturally. Sometimes that’s the case with the Bible. It’s often the preacher’s task to talk about the nuance of a Greek or Hebrew word, to share some detail of history or culture to help the text make sense. I’m sorry to say, this morning it only makes the problem worse. There are, in typical style, two different ancient Greek words for “eat,” but the one used here is in fact the grosser word;. It’s not just the general word φάγω, which is where the Greek yogurt brand FAGE gets its name: it means, “Eat!” It’s the word τρώγω, which one dictionary defines as “to bite or chew food,” and to “eat (audibly)… chew, nibble, munch.”[1] It’s the less abstract, more mechanical word.

It’s not a question of cultural context either. This talk of “drinking blood” might’ve been even more repulsive to Jesus’ fellow Jews than it is to us. Many Christian cultures include things like blood sausages or black pudding, but the Torah explicitly forbids the eating of blood—including for Gentiles, by the way, since it was part of God’s covenant with Noah after the Flood—and many of the practices of kosher butchering are specifically intended to ensure that people eat no blood. Talking about consuming blood at all would be shocking enough, let alone human blood. So if you hear Jesus’ words, his repeated insistence that we eat his flesh and drink his blood, and you feel uneasy—well, you should. And you’re not the only one. We’ll hear next week how Jesus’ words start to drive away the crowd, and no wonder, because this is so gross.

And yet in some ways, Jesus’ words here also sound so great when you put them in the right context: not a historical or cultural context, but a liturgical and theological context. What if this is about the Eucharist? What if Jesus is talking about receiving Communion? “Eat” and “drink,” “flesh” and “blood,” naturally remind us of “bread” and “wine,” and we know where to find those. Even by the time the Gospel of John was being written, this was most likely an intentional connection: for two thousand years, we’ve had a weekly ritual of eating and drinking. Jesus is just telling us what it means.

And this is a remarkable thing. Nearly every ancient religion (and most modern ones) has religious rituals around food. Typically, you’d come to worship with a gift for your god, often a sacrifice of food. You’d burn for the god to eat, you’d eat some, and you’d think this was a holy thing: you were sharing a meal with your god. The Eucharist is something more. You’re not hosting a meal for your god, and eating in the god’s presence; God is feeding you from God’s own being. It’s entirely an act of grace.

I think often of the vow I took at ordination to “nourish God’s people from the riches of God’s grace,” and I try to do that as well as I can. But really, it’s God who nourishes each one of us from the riches of God’s grace. It’s Jesus who nourishes each one of us from his own body. Our true “soul food” is his own flesh and blood, and this becomes the foundation of a lifelong bond, a connection which we’re invited to renew week after week after week.

This meal isn’t only a memorial. It isn’t only something we do to remember something Jesus did. It’s something God does to feed and sustain us now and always. Eating flesh and drinking blood may be pretty gross; being fed week after week by God is pretty great.

But there’s something strange about Jesus’ words here. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he says. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51) “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life,” he repeats later, (6:54) and he concludes, “the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (6:58)

 And yet we die.

Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, and they died; but you will live for ever, Jesus says. We know that this bread doesn’t make us live forever. It might bring us into closer communion with God. It might be an incredible gift that feeds and sustains us in this life. But it doesn’t extend our lives; there are no thousand-year-old saints among us. And even though we’re fed and nourished by God in this life, life is still pretty hard, and we still hunger and still thirst, literally and spiritually. And so you might be left with the question, “So what?” as in, “If we don’t live forever, and our hunger isn’t sated, Jesus may be living bread, but so what? What difference does it really make?”

I think it makes all the difference.

I think I’ve said this to you before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but the most meaningful part of our whole liturgy for me is what I get to I say as I distribute the bread: “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” Every week it moves me, as I walk along that rail. This is the bread of heaven. This is what they’re eating there. This is a taste of the feast God’s Wisdom has prepared, which we will one day share, not only with one another, not only with God, but with the whole heavenly host, with all those who have gone before us, and all those who will come after.

I think of that, every week, because I suspect that for every one of us, there is someone (or many someones), with whom we would give anything to share one more meal. There are people I think of, as I give this bread to you. People in all our lives who we have loved and who are no longer here. To me, to say that this is “the bread of heaven” is to say that they are sharing this meal now; that they are somehow here, and that this is just a promise of greater things to come.

That’s what “forever” means, when Jesus says we will live forever: not that we will live forever here, in this life on this earth, but that we will live forever there, with them. That we will live, as they will live; that he will raise us up with them on that last day.

Jesus doesn’t only offer a strange command in the Gospel today, to eat his flesh and drink his blood; a command so unsettling that it began to drive his disciples away. And he doesn’t only offer a meal, the promise of food that will feed us day to day, sustaining us on our journey through this life. He offers us a promise, the promise that this is eternal bread; that this is a meal that stretches beyond the boundaries of time, a foretaste of the meal that we will once again share with those who’ve gone before us.

The promise Jesus makes is that when Wisdom prepares that eternal meal, God will say to us, “Turn in here!” “Come, eat of my bread,” and we will share that bread of heaven again, no longer separated from one another by the barriers of death but finally restored to life and to love. And I don’t know about you, but that is a hope that really does feed my soul.

[1] BDAG, s.v. “τρώγω,” 1019.

Lectionary Readings

You may know that I just returned on Thursday from a three-week vacation visiting Alice’s family on Long Island, which was exactly as chaotic and wonderful and relaxing as a family vacation with three kids six and under should be. You may not know that when we’re out there, I have a certain morning routine: I’ll wake up, and go for a run, and on the way home I’ll tend to stop for a treat, either at the Blue Duck Bakery to pick up a baguette and some sliced multigrain, or at NoFoRoCo, the North Fork Roasting Company, just down the street, which has some of the best pastries in the world as far as I’m concerned, but certainly the best in eastern Long Island. Or maybe at the farm stand up the road.

So as far as the saying “you are what you eat” is concerned, I return to you this Sunday consisting almost entirely of bread. And croissants. And peaches, actually, because it’s peach season in Long Island right now, and I could eat about a dozen of those a day. Also apricots. And figs.

But I have bread on the mind today, and so does Jesus.

“I am the bread of life,” he says. (John 6:35) And John’s gospel will spend the next few weeks exploring exactly what that means. It’s a rich image: Like so much of what Jesus says, it can’t possibly be true, it must be a metaphor, and yet there’s something more than metaphorical about this idea of the “bread of life.” On the one hand, we know that Jesus, when he says this, is not literally a walking, talking loaf of bread. He’s human being. We know that although we have come to Jesus, we still hunger and we still thirst. There’s clearly some spiritual meaning of “eating” and “drinking” in what Jesus says. Maybe it involves digesting and reflecting on Jesus’ words and teachings, because he quickly moves from this image of eating the bread of heaven, to being drawn to and learning from God in Christ. The hunger, at least in part, is spiritual hunger; the nourishment is spiritual nourishment.

And yet, on the other hand, we also find ourselves coming here to Jesus, week after week, and being fed; not just metaphorically, spiritually fed, but fed, with real bread, in which and through which we believe that somehow, mysteriously, Christ is here. We eat this bread, and even though the portions are small, it is real food. We digest it, and it becomes part of us, and the Body of Christ that we receive becomes part of our own bodies, and just as the living bread came down from heaven to us, we are brought up into the presence of God.

Both literally and spiritually, we are what we eat. We become what we consume.

I sometimes wonder about our mental or spiritual diets these days. What are we consuming, and what are we becoming?

We talk about “media consumption,” sometimes, and eating is a pretty good metaphor for reading, or watching, or listening to something. When we read anxious stories about the coming demise of the planet or the nation, we become more anxious. When we listen to angry diatribes about the people with whom we disagree, we become more angry. When we spend our summers watching Olympic commentary, we become opinionated experts on sports we only think about every four years, and in fact, that’s part of what makes it fun.

But I wonder whether the diets of our attention have become unbalanced, over time. Most of the media that we consume is the mental equivalent of junk food, in a very particular way. Just as food scientists carefully calibrate the balance of sugar and salt and crunch to make snack foods irresistible without providing much additional nutrition, our politically-polarized media outlets and especially our algorithm-driven social media feeds are designed to captivate our attention, not to feed our souls. Fear and mockery and anger generate a lot more clicks and a lot more ad dollars than joy and peace and respect. It becomes easier and easier over time to be sucked into a cycle of despair and fear, because we are what we eat; we become what we consume.

And I can’t help but compare what we become when we consume these kinds of media to the image Paul offers to the Ephesians of a life in which we’re filled with grace. Paul tells them, “Be angry, but do not sin… Let no evil talk come out of your mouths… Put away all bitterness and wrath and anger, wrangling and slander… and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Eph. 4:26, 29, 31–32)

For a minute, this morning, be honest with yourself. You don’t have to admit it to anyone else. Just think: How much of what you consume with your mind, how much of what you read or watch or see on your phone, fills you with bitterness and wrath and anger, with wrangling and slander? And how much of it is giving you a kind and tender heart? How much of it is leading you to forgive, as you have been forgiven? I suspect that for most of us, the ratio favors anger.

I don’t say this as if news or politics were bad. I don’t say this as if current events were unimportant. They’re very important. I say this because what the angel says to the prophet Elijah applies just as well to each one of us: “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” (1 Kings 19:7)

Elijah sits in despair, unable to go any further. He’s a prophet living in fear of what the people in power will do. He’s done what he can, and he’s all out of strength. But God isn’t done with him. God has greater things in store, and so God sends an angel, and says to him, “Get up and eat.” And Elijah eats, and goes back to sleep. And the angel wakes him up again, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much.” And he gets up, and eats, and travels forty days, and it’s then and only then that he hears that still, small voice of God.

This is not a theological statement about the nature of bread. It’s not a finger-wagging reminder or an exhortation to improve his diet, literal or metaphorical. It’s a simple statement of fact: if you don’t eat something that nourishes you, you’re not going to make it to the end.

 Whatever your politics, the next three months or so will probably be an anxious time. Even politics aside, I can safely predict that this year will be full of opportunities to feed on anger, and anxiety, and fear, because every year is.

So what do you need in your spiritual diet this year to make it to the end of the journey? What do you need to put away bitterness and wrath, and to fill yourself on kindness and love? What sustenance do you need to “walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God?” (Eph. 5:2)

We’ll have a few weeks more to delve into the living bread: But what does it mean for you, today, for this meal to feed you, so that you can make it for another week?

Lectionary Readings

Almost fifteen years ago, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a wonderful TED talk with the title, “The Danger of a Single Story.” The talk was a series of stories about what happens when we reduce all the complexity of a person’s life or a nation’s culture to a single story, as if something could only be one thing at once. And she explored this through stories from her own life.

She began with a visit to her family’s servants in the village they’d come from. Like many middle-class Nigerians in the city, her family employed domestic help. And her mother always told her how poor they were, how desperate the lives of their families were out there in the countryside. Chimamanda was shocked when they went for a visit one day. Not only was their village more beautiful than the desperate poverty she’d imagined, but the servants whom she’d been raised to pity were local heroes—the ones who’d made it in the big city and came back to spread their wealth. Her mother had only told her one story about their lives; but there were many more.

The pattern was reversed when she came to America for college, and realized that the single story of poverty she had been told about her family’s servants was the same story all her classmates had heard about Africa as a whole. Her parents weren’t oil tycoons, but they weren’t subsistence farmers—they were university professors. And yet her classmates looked at her as the distillation of every news story about any country in Africa. They asked her how her English got so good—it’s the official language of Nigeria. They looked to her for answers about countries thousands of miles across the continent. They asked her to play the tribal music of her people—and they were shocked when she put on Mariah Carey.

The danger of the single story is that limits who a person can be and what they can do. When people tell a single story about you, they insist that they already know who you are—that they know your beginning, middle, and end. Chimamanda’s mother told a single story, and she was wrong. Her classmates told a single story about her, and she turned it on its head.

And in our Gospel reading this morning, the danger of the single story comes to Jesus, and it turns out that the story that the people get to experience is exactly the story that they tell.

Jesus has been traveling around Galilee for a while, sailing back and forth across the sea, healing people and teaching and casting out demons, as usual. And he finally comes back to Nazareth, and begins to teach there, in the synagogue, on the Sabbath. And the people who hear him are amazed. But not exactly in a good way. “Where’d he get all this?” they say. (Mark 6:1) Isn’t this Mary’s kid? That’s James’s little brother, right? Isn’t that his sister over there? He’s no preacher. He’s no rabbi. He’s a carpenter. What’s he doing in the pulpit? they ask. And they take offense. (6:2–3)

They already know his story. They already know his role. They already know his place, and he needs to learn what it is.

And remarkably, Jesus goes along with it. He shakes his head, and offers a wise saying about prophets and their hometowns, but “he could do no deed of power there… except” heal a few people who are sick. (6:5)

It turns out that if you want to stop Jesus right in his tracks, this is the way to do it. If you feel like there’s something changing in your life, some growth or development, some new opportunity or lost capability, and you want to resist what the Holy Spirit might be doing—you can. If you have the sensation that God might be extending you an invitation to leave something behind in your life and step into something new, and you want to decline that invitation—you can reply with your regrets.

Just stick to the single story you tell about yourself.

I can’t leave this job right now and take that one—I’m supposed to care about X, even though I’m really finding myself more drawn to Y. I can’t let my children take care of me, even though they’re fifty or sixty years old—I’m a strong and independent person, and strong and independent people don’t need help. I can’t become friends with this neighbor, I can’t cross this line in our community—I know what they are like already, and we have nothing in common, I’m sure.

If you want to try to put an end to what the Holy Spirit is doing in your life, you can.

But then again, here you are in church. So what if you want to cooperate instead?

The danger in the Gospel this morning is the danger of the single story. But the invitation is the invitation to be like the apostles, to live our lives like those disciples Jesus sent out two by two to teach.

He sends them out, leaving everything behind. They take nothing with them with them but a walking stick—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts. They go out, to share the love of God with the world, and Jesus tells them that they should be prepared to fail. He tells them that times will come when they’re treated like his old neighbors treated him—when people are so stuck in the single story that they tell, that they refuse to welcome this story of good news. And he tells them what to do when others try to dismiss them. Don’t fight, don’t argue, don’t wag your finger—but shake the dust off your feet, and walk away. And where Jesus had failed, the disciples succeed: they cast out many demons, and heal many people who are sick.

I wonder what it would be like to think of yourself, on your journey through this world, as being like one of those apostles. I wonder what it would be like to lay down all the stories that you tell about yourself, the stories that limit you to do what you have always done and be who you have always been, and listen for the story the Holy Spirit is trying to tell. I wonder what it would be like to go out on the metaphorical road, taking only your walking stick, bringing only your curiosity, and faith, and the good news that God loves you and everyone around you, and to see where that road leads. I wonder what it would be like to be prepared to fail, to know that when you come to a fork in the road and you choose the wrong one, when things don’t work out, you can always shake the dust off your feet.

Everyone in this room is on a different journey through the world. We find ourselves at different places on the road. But it’s all one road. Our lives, and the lives of the people around us all contain maintain stories, and yet they are all part of God’s one story of love for us. And we are part of that story, whether we choose to be active participants or simply to stand by.

So I want to close by offering again the prayer with which this service began:

O God, you have taught us to keep all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor: Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to you with our whole heart, and united to one another with pure affection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Lectionary Readings

These two stories of healing couldn’t be more different from one another; but when you get down to it, they’re exactly the same.

Jairus’s young daughter is in an acute crisis, near the end of her life; the woman who touches Jesus’ cloak has been suffering chronically for longer than Jairus’ daughter has been alive. Jairus comes openly to Jesus before the crowd. The woman approaches surreptitiously. He begs him over and over to heal his daughter, she reaches out without saying a word. He’s is a prominent member of society, a leader of the local synagogue, with messengers and mourners waiting back at home; she comes to Jesus alone and bankrupt, and the only social contact we hear about is with the physicians, under whose care she’s suffered much.

Their circumstances and their behaviors couldn’t be more different, and in fact they find themselves somewhat in competition. After all, when Jesus and Jairus set out for Jairus’ home, to heal his daughter, there’s no time to lose. She’s at the point of death. But the woman touches Jesus’ cloak, and she is healed, and Jesus turns aside. “Who touched my clothes?” he says. (Mark 5:30)

And I can only imagine how Jairus must have felt, just in front of him, leading the way to his daughter’s sickbed. He’s rushed out to find Jesus, and he’s found him; even better, he’s actually convinced him to come heal his daughter, and now Jesus has stopped along the way to ask, “Who touched my clothes?” in the middle of a crowd. Even the disciples are amazed— “Look at all these people,” they say. How could anyone know? (5:31) But the woman comes forward and falls on her knees. And Jesus blesses her and sends her along her way. (5:34)

Mark doesn’t tell us what’s going through Jairus’s head. But we can guess. If Jesus needs to stop and heal somebody, fine. But why the conversation? Why the delay? This woman’s sickness is important, for sure, but not urgent, not like his daughter’s illness; and yet Jesus takes his time, and I imagine Jairus somewhere between impatient and afraid.

And his worst fears are about to be realized, because while Jesus is still speaking, while he is still stopped along the way, someone comes bearing a message from Jairus’s house. “Your daughter is dead,” they say. And Jairus, who was full of words at the beginning of the story, begging Jesus repeatedly to come heal his daughter, is left speechless as his relief turns into despair.

But Jesus simply says, “Do not fear, only believe.” (5:37) He sends away the crowd who follow him, and the crowd of mourners. And despite their incredulous laughter at the idea that the child who has died while Jesus dilly-dallied on the road is merely asleep, he says to her, “Get up.” And she does.

This is a long story, and it’s full of strange and enticing details. There are so many questions that you might want to ask. What does it mean to say that Jesus’ healing power can simply flow out of him, that miracles can happen without his knowledge just because someone touched his cloak? Why does Mark record what Jesus says to the girl in Aramaic, Talitha cum, while translating the rest? Why does Jesus do everything in secrecy, sending away the crowd and the mourners and telling the family and the disciples to tell no one what they have seen? What’s up with the snack at the end?

If you step back for a minute, you might ask a bigger question. I said that the two healing stories couldn’t be more different, but at the heart of things, they’re really the same: Two stories about desperate people putting their faith in Jesus. This isn’t faith as a statement of belief, a collection of well-thought-out ideas about God and the world. This is faith as the last desperate act of someone who’s tried everything else. This is the trust that his help might make a difference. Jairus is so convinced that Jesus can save his daughter, in fact, that he gives up his last chance to see her alive to come and find him.

And the faith of these two people seems to be the catalyst for the healing that comes. “Daughter, your faith has made you well,” Jesus says to the woman he has healed. “Go in peace, and be healed.” (Mark 5:34)

If only it were so easy for us.

 The connection between healing, faith, and prayer is one of the most difficult ones in spiritual life, in my experience. We want to pray for healing, for ourselves, for other people, for the world. We want God to act, to cure us of our ailments whether they’re physical, or psychological, or spiritual. We wish we could just reach out and touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak, and be healed. And sometimes, remarkably, it seems that we are healed. I don’t know about you, but I really have seen examples of this kind of change. Sometimes that means recovery from an illness or injury in a way that baffles doctors’ expectations. Sometimes it’s recovery from an addiction that seemed impossible to shake. Sometimes it’s a sudden about-turn in life, that can only be described as a divine intervention.

But then, there are all the other times. All too often, the healing that we pray for doesn’t come. Our sick friend gets sicker, no matter how hard we pray; or our seemingly-healthy friend is suddenly at the brink, at the very moment when things seemed like they were finally looking up. And the more we hope for a miracle, the more we pray for healing, the stronger our faith that God will surely help, the worse it feels when nothing seems to change. Like Jairus, we’re left holding the disappointment and frustration that comes when our hopes for something better are dashed.

 And I think we find ourselves in this second situation more often than not. The story of the New Testament is the story of miracles that come one after another. The story of Christian life is a story of prayers that seem to go unanswered.

But if the story of Jairus’ daughter tells us anything, maybe it’s that sometimes, it’s just too soon to tell.

If you pause the story when Jesus sends away the woman who’s been healed, Jairus’s mission has been a failure. He thought his prayers were being answered, he got his hopes up, but God didn’t answer soon enough. Jesus delayed, and his daughter died, and the healing that he hoped for never came, and the story ends with grief.

But the story doesn’t end there. Within minutes, everything has changed. Jairus’s daughter is alive. She’s walking around, and having something to eat. His prayers were not unanswered; they just hadn’t been answered yet, and God was doing something that Jairus hadn’t asked for, something that he probably hadn’t even imagined was possible.

That’s the challenging hope of the Christian faith: God’s response to our prayers for healing is never “no,” but sometimes it’s “not yet,” and sometimes “yes” doesn’t come this side of eternity. Because we know, after two thousand years of Christian life, that we don’t get to have Jairus’s miracle in the quite the same way. We say every Sunday that we believe in the resurrection of the dead, but we don’t mean that that will come in this world. Like Jairus, we will see the people we have loved and lost again, but in the world to come. The pain of loss and grief are just as real for us as they were for him on that long walk home, and our grief lasts much longer. But given the choice between two worlds—the world in which God doesn’t answer most of our prayers, and the world in which God just hasn’t answered them yet, I know which one I’d choose, any day.

I don’t know which prayers of yours need answering today; where you need God to do something that hasn’t happened yet, where you need something to change in yourself or someone else, but the change has not yet come. I don’t know where your soul “waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning.” (Psalm 130:5)

But I hold onto the promise that’s at the heart of Christian hope: That there is a God who loves you, and who cares for you, a God who is answering your prayers, even if you can’t see it happening yet; that there is a future in which our divisions will cease and our pain will end—that however long the night is that we spend in weeping, joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:6)

Lectionary Readings

I’m always amazed by whose daily work consists of dealing with relatively stressful parts of the rest of our lives. The surgeon who walks into a room and describes precisely how she’s going to slice through your heart, with no apparent anxiety about the procedure, because while this is the scariest moment of your life, for her, it’s just a Tuesday at the office. The skydiving instructor who casually launches people out of an airplane before jumping out himself, as he’s done hundreds of times before. The airline pilot who pops onto the announcements to say, “This is your captain speaking. It looks like we’ve got a little bit of bumpy air up ahead, so I’m going to put on the seatbelt sign…” You can’t see him through the door, but he’s probably up there popping Fritos while you’re clutching the armrests for dear life! These people can be soothing—surely, if they think it’s not such a big deal, maybe it’s not such a big deal. But they’re also unnerving—after all, isn’t there a chance they’re just completely nuts?

Jesus is one of these people, for sure. Jesus is with the disciples in the boat, but he’s acting in a way that’s not at all like the disciples in the boat.

As a matter of fact, he’s been with the disciples in the boat all day. Such a large crowd had gathered that morning that Jesus had gotten into a boat on the sea and sat there, while people crowded around on land to listen. (Mark 4:1) He told them parables about sowing seed, and hiding lamps under a bushel, and how the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, and “on that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let’s go across to the other side.’” (4:35) Now, Jesus is tired—speaking to a crowd without a microphone will do that to you—and he falls asleep. Deeply asleep. A huge wind starts to blow, and the waves are breaking over the bow, and the boat is being swamped. You can imagine the scene: people rushing around, trying to bail out; throwing things overboard, and desperately trying to remember how to swim.

But in the stern, Jesus is asnooze. And they go back and start shaking him—“Teacher,” they say, “Don’t you care that we’re perishing!?” (4:38) And he wakes up, and yawns. And what does he do?

Does he start shouting orders, like a seasoned sea captain, like the commanding Messiah they might expect him to be? “Batten down the hatches! Ease the sails!” (I’m not a sailor.) No. He does not.

Does he call upon the name of God, like a wise pastor, praying in words that give voice to the fear and pain of his people and bring them comfort, that artfully articulate their deepest desires in the moment of their greatest need? “O God, you still the storms of the sea; surround us with your loving care; protect us from all danger; and bring us in safety to our journey’s end. Amen.” No. He does not.

Does he grab a bucket and start bailing? Nope. Does he panic, too? Of course not. He looks over the side of the boat at the sea, and he says, “You stop it! Chill!” And it does.

This little vignette tells us so much about God, and about Jesus, and about our lives, and I think it goes back to a distinction I noted earlier: just as Jesus was with the disciples in that boat on those stormy seas, but he wasn’t like the disciples in that boat on those stormy seas, Jesus is with us on our sometimes-stormy pathways through life—but Jesus isn’t quite like us, and that’s a very good thing.

Jesus is with us. And Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. Our God is not a cruel god, playing with us for sport, creating storms to torment us. And our God is not a cold, clinical god, swamping us with waves to test our faith or improve our endurance. God is not an absent god, creating the universe and laying down a moral order and then gone off somewhere on vacation, while the world burns and our prayers pile up in the inbox. Our God is a compassionate God, a God who “suffers with” us—this is what “compassion” means, “suffering with”—a God who comes among us on earth, and experiences what we experience. God feels every wave as it hits the boat, and God knows what it’s like to be swamped.

God is with us, but God is not exactly like us. Jesus doesn’t panic, when the people around him are panicking. He’s not afraid of the wind and the storm. He absorbs their panic and their fear. Like that skilled surgeon or jaded airline pilot he remains unbothered, infuriatingly calm. But he doesn’t just stay calm. He acts, in an unexpected way. He speaks directly to the sea, and tells it to be still, and it is.

There’s a dramatic irony in this story, something we know that the disciples don’t. “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” they ask, and we know that in fact, he cares very much. He cares not just about them, but about all of us; not just about the fact that they might be perishing in that boat, but that we are all perishing; that we are all only mortal, in the end. He knows, and he cares, and he acts.

In this story, he immediately stills the storm. But there’s an echo of another ending here, another way that he could act. Did anyone hear the echo of the book of Jonah in this story? Jonah flees from God’s call, and gets on a ship, and God sends a storm. There’s wind and waves and the sailors are afraid, but Jonah lies asleep. The two scenes are the same. The sailors wake Jonah up, and tell him to pray to his god, like they are praying to theirs. And Jonah, like Jesus, chooses to act. Unlike Jesus, he doesn’t rebuke the storm. He tells the sailors, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea.” (Jonah 1:12) And they do. And the ship is saved. And that’s where the whale comes in, by the way—God sends a whale to swallow him up, and Jonah remains entombed in the belly of the whale three days, and then rises again. (Does that ring any bells?)

Jesus doesn’t throw himself into the sea to save his companions. Not yet. But that’s where the story is going. The echoes of Jonah are no accident. Jesus is going to throw himself off the boat, metaphorically speaking, to save the people around him. Jesus is going to hand himself over to death on the Cross, and after three days, rise again. And it’s that act of self-sacrificing love that saves us from the power of death so that we, too, can travel safely across the stormy seas to the other side.

Maybe this morning you feel battered by the storm, tossed around by the waves and barely hanging on. Maybe this morning you feel good, but you remember what that’s like. Or maybe you look around at a world that’s full of chaos, and violence, and war, and like the disciples, sometimes you feel afraid.

You’re not alone. God is with you in the boat. God loves you, and God cares that you’re in danger, and God comes to be with you there. And you are allowed to cry out! You’re allowed to say to God, like the disciples say to Jesus, “Don’t you care!?” That doesn’t bother God one bit. Jesus is calm, whatever the source of the storm. And when you bring that fear and pain to God in prayer, God can help to lighten the load, because God can carry any amount of it for you, and God will not be swamped.

Sometimes God works through other people, of course. Sometimes God is present to us in our own, quiet prayer, but often God is present to us in a friend’s listening ear, or in a conversation with someone we trust. You even pay someone to sit and listen while you talk to God sometimes, even if you think you’re talking to me. And that’s all well and good, and I hope that it helps calm the waves.

But God is not just a listening ear. Like Jesus, waking up in that boat, God chooses to act, in mysterious and sometimes surprising ways. I wish it were the case that God would simply still the storm. I wish it were the case that we could see such quick results. But who am I to try to guess where God is acting and where God’s not? I wasn’t there, nor was Job, when God laid the foundation of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and the heavenly beings shouted for joy. (Job 38:4, 7) I can only trust that God is stilling the storm to a whisper, that God is working in our lives and in our world to calm the waves, and that God will one day bring us safely that distant shore.

I love the middle of June. For me, it’s the time when the world feels most vibrant, especially on a day when it’s 72 degrees with a light breeze, like today, and the wind is rustling through the leaves. Those leaves blow me away. They’re as green as the altar hangings. Greener, in fact, almost a truer kind of green that makes the sogginess of spring feel like it’s finally paid off. June is a time of transformation and growth. The school year is coming to an end, and summer vacation is beginning, and you can see it in the faces of the children on the street. The days are as long as they’re going to get, and you can hear it in the songs of the birds in the morning. The days are warm and bright, and all around Charlestown, on streets wide and narrow, utility trucks have sprouted up to jackhammer and to dig round the clock.

Even Jesus has joined in the spirit of the season. For his part, he gives us two parables of growth this Sunday, two images from the natural world to help us understand the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is like a seed, sown in the ground, he says; and the kingdom of God is like the mustard seed, smallest of all the seeds.

There’s a parade today, so that’s all the cute intro you’ll get. Let’s dig right in.

Actually, first, I should say a word about what these parables are about: the “kingdom of God.” Jesus doesn’t say “God is like a sower, who scatters seed on the ground.” And he doesn’t say that faith is like a mustard seed, which will grow in you—that’s a different parable altogether. (Matthew 17:20, Luke 13:19) These parables aren’t about you, or Jesus, or God, but “the kingdom of God,” and for Jesus, this is almost a technical term. It’s the main thing that Jesus teaches about. He isn’t here to tell us what to do, or even to tell us how to deepen our spiritual lives. He’s here to tell us something about “the kingdom of God.”

This “kingdom” is not a place—it’s more of a situation, or a state of reality. It’s the kingship of God, it’s the idea of God becoming king, and no one else. The people of Israel had been ruled in the past by famous kings, by David and Solomon and all their heirs, but they had gone astray; they were not “good shepherds” of the people. In Jesus’ day, they’d been ruled for hundreds of years by foreign kings, who had no interest in anything but their own power. The prophets had long foretold that there would come a time when God himself would become king, when God would give up on human rulers and come down to shepherd the people. So “the kingdom of God” is a kind of shorthand for what God is doing in this world to bring about God’s vision of justice and peace.

As Jesus begins his ministry, John the Baptist is preaching that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near!” (Mark 1:15) Jesus begins to teach the people what that means. And they’re curious: Will he lead them in a revolutionary war? Will they finally throw the Roman armies out? Will the kingdom of God finally come, with God ruling over the people in splendor and glory? Will there be a parade?

Not exactly.

I want to say three things about these two parables of the kingdom of God:

Thing Number 1: The kingdom grows slowly, on its own schedule, in unobserved and often-unobservable ways. It’s like a seed, sown upon the earth. Day after night, the farmer wakes up, and checks on the seed, and goes to sleep, (4:27) but nothing that the farmer does affects its growth, especially in the days before modern fertilizers and irrigation, when it was all just up to the soil and the rain. The farmer can’t even see the change: the seed sprouts and grows, but it’s down there in the dirt, and it’s not until it sprouts up that the farmer knows it’s growing at all. The earth “produces of itself,” our translation somewhat awkwardly says: Mark says in Greek that the earth bears fruit automátē, “automatically,” and I like that. (4:28) Whatever God’s doing in the world, it’s happening in its own way and on its own time, and we can barely even see it growing, let alone do anything to hurry it along.

And yet—and here’s Thing Number 2—things only happen slowly until they happen all at once. Night turns to day, and day turns to night; the farmer goes to sleep, and rises again, as the seed slowly grows into a plant: the stalk, the head, the grain, then BANG! The sickle comes out. (4:29) There’s nothing for the farmer to do, day after day until field of grain is ripe, and then there’s more work than there’s time, because the harvest has come. It’s like the parable of the leaven, when Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a little yeast mixed into some flour. The dough rises slowly, for a while, and then when it’s ready, it goes into the oven. God acts in the world through slow, steady preparation—then sudden transformation.

And what a transformation it is. That’s Thing Number 3: When God starts working in the world or in our lives, we can’t begin to imagine what’s coming on the other side. The mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds—not really, but whatever—but the shrub that grows is big. And this is a testament to the scale of what God can do. But the parable of the mustard seed isn’t just about God making something big from something very, very small. The shrub and the seed aren’t just different in quantity; they’re different in kind.

Who could look at a tiny mustard seed and picture the entire plant? Who could look at an acorn or a little whirligig and imagine the oak or the maple? Take a look at one of those trees outside, towering and green, and try to imagine its whole growth. And then run the process in reverse: If all you had were seeds, would you really be able to imagine those towering trees, with their bright green leaves?

We live in a world of seeds, just beginning to grow. And we can only begin to imagine what they will become. All around us, in our neighborhoods, in our families, in our own lives, the kingdom of God is growing like a seed. Whatever change God is bringing about, it’s going to come slowly, slowly, slowly—then all at once.

You might not notice it right now. The mustard seed, after all, is very small. And if you’re wondering how small, well… I don’t usually go in for gimmicky props in my preaching, but “for everything there is a season.” And all around this church I’ve hidden a dozen mustard seeds. And I’ve left a couple little bowls, on the way out the two doors, for you to take one home.

And your homework is this—It has two parts:

“For you have made [us] glad by your acts, O Lord,
and [we] shout for joy because of the works of your hands.”
(Psalm 92:4)

Amen.

Lectionary Readings

Have you ever heard the one about the college undergrad who wanders into a debate about the nature of free will?

So, a group of philosophy professors is meeting for their monthly faculty lunch. And they’re arguing about free will. Do we, as human beings, have control over our actions, or are they just the result of physical or biological processes beyond our control?

 “Look, people are responsible for their actions,” one professor says over lunch. “Yes, of course they’re shaped by their experiences of the past. But we know that mature human beings make choices all the time between right and wrong. We have free will, and we’re responsible for what we do with it.”

“Oh, come on!” says the second one. “We can’t just work off intuition. Psychology clearly show that our brains make decisions for us before we’ve even consciously realized it, and then we come up with the rationalizations after. Our wills aren’t free at all; our actions are just the result of biology. Empirical science shows that free will is an illusion.”

“Science?” asks the third. “You want to talk about science? Don’t you know anything about how the advent of quantum physics has opened our eyes to a non-deterministic model of causality!?” Things are really heating up.

Just then, a sophomore who’s wandered into the room pipes up. “I’m not so sure about free will. I walked in here, and I saw your lunch buffet, and— I know it was wrong, and I knew I shouldn’t do it, but, well… I just couldn’t stop myself. I ate all the cookies.”

From the Christian theological perspective, at least, there are really two different questions about free will: “Do we have free will?” as in, are the choices we make totally determined by some outside thing, by biology or physics or even by God, or are they under our control? But there’s another question, too— “Do we have free will?” as in, “When we make a decision, whether that’s really an individual choice or determined by some outside force—can we actually follow through?” Are our wills free? Or are they somehow in chains?

The Apostle Paul famously wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) You may know the feeling. Our cookie-eating student certainly does. It’s what Martin Luther called, somewhat ominously, The Bondage of the Will, the fact that the human will is, in some sense, constrained; that there’s some gap between our conscious decision-making processes, and the things we actually do. And I think this is the more relevant question about free will. With all due respect to our philosophical friends, few people are bothered day to day about whether their decisions are predetermined by biology or physics or not; but many people struggle with the inadequacy of their willpower to carry out those decisions.

It’s a pattern that dates back all the way to the beginning of humankind, to this foundational story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. They had free will, and they gave it away. They received the command from God never to eat the fruit of the tree that stood in the middle of the Garden. But they ate it, anyway.

They try to pass the blame along. Both Adam and Eve try to claim that they didn’t have free will, that their actions had some cause outside themselves. “The woman whom you gave me,” says Adam, trying to pin the blame not only on Eve but on God, “she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” (Gen. 3:12) Then God turns to Eve: Don’t look at me! she seems to say. “The serpent tricked me, and I ate!” (Gen. 3:13)

It’s not a very good defense. God entrusted them with the freedom to choose, but told them not to eat the fruit, but they did it anyway, and so God put enmity between the serpent in the Garden and the woman, and between their descendants. And this sounds just about right, because here we are, all these generations later, still struggling against our demons.

You often find Jesus battling demons, too. That’s not just a cute segue from one reading to the next. Much of Jesus’ time, in his early ministry, especially in this early Gospel of Mark, is spent casting out demons of one kind or another. Before he even begins teaching the disciples anything, in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, here he is, so renowned for his demon-fighting skills that people have begun to speculate. Is he a demon himself? Or at least, demon-possessed? Is he a sorcerer who calls on one dark power to defeat another?

Not at all, Jesus replies. “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” (Mark 3:23-24) To use evil to cast out evil would only weaken itself.

Jesus isn’t evil, or using evil powers. I assume we can all agree on that.

But Jesus continues with an interesting image, that’s a little less obvious: “No one can enter the Strong One’s house,” he says, “and plunder his property, without first tying up the Strong One; then indeed the house can be plundered.” (Mark 3:27) Of all the metaphors we have for who Jesus is and what Jesus does, this has to be one of the strangest: Jesus Christ, Burglar.

Here’s one way to understand what Jesus means: The house is the world in which we live. The Strong One is the spiritual force of evil, violence, and despair that Jews and Christians have sometimes personified as Satan or the serpent. Jesus’ ultimate battle is not with any of the smaller forces of evil, the demons that afflicted people in their lives. Jesus first needs to confront the great power, the Strong One himself, and tie him up; and when that power is bound, then the property in the house can be plundered; when the Strong One is held captive, then we can be freed.  

This is, ultimately, the story of Jesus’ life, and of his journey toward the Cross. Jesus is headed toward a struggle against all the powers that hold us down, against the power of Death itself. And we live now, as always, in the in-between time, when Jesus’ victory has begun, but is not yet complete; when the Strong One has been bound, but we’re not yet fully free.

And so we have the ability to love. We have the ability to will and to work for the good. But our wills are not yet completely free to do what’s right, as perfectly as we might want.

So there’s the bad news: the human will isn’t free. We will never reach the place of perfect self-control, in which our conscious decisions and our actions are always perfectly aligned. We’ll never even reach the place in which our decisions or our values are exactly what they should be. We’ll never quite love God with our whole hearts. It’s unlikely that we’ll love our neighbors as ourselves; that bar can be very high, depending on the neighbor. We’ll come here, again and again, with the need to confess our smaller sins, our gossip or apathy, our harsh words or our imperfect compassion—and sometimes even bigger ones.

But that’s good news, too: the human will isn’t free. If you find yourself, coming here, again and again, just as imperfect as the week before— It’s not just you. And I don’t mean that to pass along the blame (“The woman whom you gave me, she gave me the fruit!”) I mean it as an antidote to shame. There’s no shame in being an imperfect person, in having imperfect control over your will. That’s not an individual flaw. That’s the human condition. And everyone else faces that struggle, too.

 But there’s even better news than that, and it’s this: We’re not facing that struggle alone. The Holy Spirit is with you, in all the decisions and all the actions of daily life, strengthening you, helping you grow toward a more consistent and a more compassionate kind of love; pray for the Holy Spirit to guide you in those decisions and in those actions, when you need God’s help. Jesus has already gone before you, to bind up the Strong One so that you can be free, even if imperfectly so. And God is beckoning you forward, inviting you into a renewed and restored life, raising you up just as Jesus was raised (2 Cor. 4:14). So “do not lose heart,” as Paul says. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed, day by day.”  Amen.