In my house the waiting is already becoming unbearable. We were in Long Beach for the Thanksgiving weekend visiting family, and after the day of Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas lights started going up all around us. We went on a walk/Big Wheel ride around the block and watched the neighbors setting up their displays. ‘When are we going to do ours?’ our kids asked. Later, we said. We drove home, arriving in our own neighborhood after dark. Lights were already up on some houses. ‘Maybe those are still for Diwali,’ said Frances uncertainly. Maybe, I said. Two days later the neighbors across the street could be seen in their window putting up their Christmas tree. ‘When are we going to get ours??’ the kids asked. Later, we said. That day Frances came back from school reporting that her best friends had all got their Christmas trees over the weekend. ‘Why do we have to wait so long for ours?’ she asked. Because we’re the cranky ones that say it’s Advent before it’s Christmas, and besides, Advent is only now just beginning – it didn’t start on Thanksgiving. That’s why. Just wait.

At least today our kids are able to open the windows in the Advent calendar; at least this weekend we mixed up our favorite fruitcake recipe so it can ripen for Christmas. We might even bend soon on the outside lights, since it’s so dark outside and if we put it off we might not get to it at all – like what happened last year. But then there really won’t be a whole lot for a while. All their friends, and all the stores, and all the neighborhoods around us, are full tilt into Christmas. But we’re making them wait.

Of course I think this is all character-building. We do a lot of things differently in our family than our kids see their peers doing, and I know we’ll just look weirder and weirder the older they get. Other kids have potato chips for their recess snack, Frances has carrots and dried fruit. Other kids do their birthday parties at Chuck E Cheese; ours go to the art museum. There’s some complaining about this, of course. But someday they’ll thank us, I think. Waiting is good for you – not giving into instant gratification, enjoying the anticipation, savoring what is to come instead of consuming it and moving on. In the summer we wait for the fruit to be ripe before we eat it – the plums on the tree are no good when they’re green, the pears in the basket aren’t nearly as tasty when they’re hard, and so we wait. Similarly, we wait till Christmas is ripe before we start celebrating it – no matter what’s happening all around us. It’s not just being weird – we think it’s better that way.

Advent is a wonderful time for reminding us of just how different the church is from the rest of the world. Every year in the church we go through this ritual of scolding, resolutely keeping the poinsettias and trees out of the sanctuary till Christmas Eve, keeping to somber-toned Advent hymns instead of the Christmas carols playing everywhere else, slowly and painfully lighting one single candle more each week instead of a blaze of twinkly lights. And then on the other end, we keep singing the carols all the way into January, long after everyone else has kicked the tree to the curb. Some of us keep to this in our own homes as well – we’ll make the Advent wreaths today, a way for you to do a similar kind of waiting ritual at home – but I suspect many of you have already started on the tree and the lights and the decorations at home…am I right? It’s okay if you have. All of this falls more into the category of tradition and family rhythms than anything else. God still loves you if you have your Christmas tree up already, even if your cranky rector disapproves.

But there is another way that we in the church could be reminding ourselves to be different from the rest of the world, much more radical than what we do or don’t do with holiday decorations. We heard a glimmer of it in today’s gospel, Jesus talking about the end times and the coming redemption. Look for th[...]

RCL Year B, Proper 27

I went to seminary up at CDSP in Berkeley, which is part of the consortium called the GTU, the Graduate Theological Union. That’s a whole mix of seminaries, Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Unitarian and more. Besides the more weighty classes of Bible, theology, ethics, and so on, there were other funkier classes on offer – things like Jewish folklore, or Poetry & Prayer, or Dance Meditation. I took an improv dance class , not because I was anything of a dancer, but because I was curious. The teacher had us try what she called contact duets, improv dance with a partner without talking. We would try it out and then talk about what it felt like as you guessed and second-guessed what the other person was doing. It was a pretty revealing exercise: You might find yourself frustrated with the other person, or thrilled at how well you seemed to connect. You might throw yourself at the other person only to have them drop you – or find yourself perfectly caught, met with equal strength and force. It was so satisfying to be met well by the other person, and so maddening not to be. It turned out to translate pretty well to real life and relationships, in fact – acting out without words what we do together all the time.

I was thinking of this as I looked at today’s readings, because we get two stories of a kind of dance between two partners. Two improvised contact duets, if you will, one between Ruth and Boaz in the Old Testament reading, and one between the widow at the temple and God in the gospel reading. In each story someone throws themselves completely at another – Ruth throws herself at Boaz, the widow throws herself on God’s providence – and then waits to see how the other might respond. It’s a chance for us to think about how far we might trust another, or trust God – and what response we might get.

Last week we heard the setup of Ruth’s story, how her husband and all the men in his family died and how she decided to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi in a strange land rather than return to her own family. In today’s excerpt Naomi is worried about Ruth and schemes to figure out a new husband for her, sending her off to try to catch Boaz’s eye. Boaz is the male next-of-kin, bound by the law to accept Ruth as wife even though he has never seen her. It’s a pretty racy story, of course: off Ruth goes, and climbs into bed with Boaz – a good way to get his attention, apparently. Ruth has nothing to lose at this point; cling to Naomi all she might, that won’t afford her protection and money to live on in the culture of her time. She needs Boaz to give that to her. So she throws her whole self at Boaz, and happily for her, he responds. They marry and have a son – everything a woman could hope for, in the eyes of the biblical writer. (Blessedly, times have changed.) In fact, their offspring include David, and later Jesus, so this story is more than just one between two ordinary people. But Boaz, you could say, catches Ruth perfectly, matching her well in the duet they improvise together.

In the other story, we stand with Jesus and the disciples, observing people putting money into the temple treasury.  We see rich people putting in lots of money, and others putting in less.  And the one Jesus commends to his disciples is the poorest widow, who puts in only a penny’s worth of coins. He commends her because though the others have given out of their abundance, out of what they had left over, this widow puts in everything she has, ‘all she had to live on.’  Without reserving for herself, she gives everything to the temple, to God. She throws herself completely at God, trusting that God will take care of her. We don’t get to hear what happens next, how God responds – all we know is that Jesus seems to say this is what we should do as well. Her trust and abandon is a model for us of how to be, and yet we don’t know for sure what her dance partner does in response.

With people, of course, it isn’t always safe [...]

RCL Year B, Proper 26

O God, grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

So today we come to the actual commemoration of ECA’s 45th birthday, which dates to November 1, 1967. We celebrated last week because that’s when the Bishop could be with us. But today, the Sunday after All Saints, is when we normally say Happy Birthday to ourselves – and we’ll celebrate it today by giving ourselves gifts, the pledges we will bring to the altar in a little bit to offer and bless before God. It’s a good day for such a celebration. All Saints is a feast day with a lot of room in it for all of us: it’s one where we remember all the saints named and unnamed of the church, and where we also know ourselves again to be part of the communion of saints past, present, and yet to come.

Today is also the traditional day of the New York City Marathon. This year, of course, that race is not being run, a first in its 32-year history. There’s a different kind of marathon being run in New York and New Jersey, one that’s just beginning as they try to recover from the storm. It’s probably right that they don’t try to attempt hosting the other kind of run as well. But we still have that prayer, the collect we heard at the beginning of our service, talking about the faith journey in the metaphor of running. It’s a metaphor found in various places in scripture, in Isaiah talking about God as one who gives us strength so that we may run and not be weary; it’s in the book of Hebrews, ‘…let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.’ And Paul talks in more than one letter about running the race of faith, praying that he may not run it in vain.

So we’re running a race today too, the race to be a saint. But just what is a saint? It’s a term we use in three different ways, really.

There are people in the history of the church we call saints, St Francis or St Paul or St Teresa, people whose lives showed heroic faith and miraculous strength, who left a legacy of greatness, who had a deep influence on the church through their teaching and preaching and writing and example. They’re like the elite runners in the marathon, the ones whose whole lives are dedicated to the sport, who are at the head of every pack in the great races around the world. In our tradition we look to these saints as models, getting to know them as people through their writings and stories of them left for us to read.

We also on this day remember the less famous folks, our parents or grandparents or dear friends who have died and gone before us, whose lives in some way touched ours and gave us an example to follow. They will never make the larger church calendar, but they made a difference to us. So we remember them with love and gratitude – part of the larger communion of saints, part of our commemorating All Souls Day as we pray for and remember all the dead. They’re like the pacesetters of the marathon, those whom we look to as we run to help us run the race at a good pace for our abilities, who push us to do our best, but not to try to be what we are not.

And we also use the term ‘saints’ to apply to all of us, all of those who are part of the body of Christ, the church. It’s one of the four days in the year when we baptize new members, bringing new saints into the community of the church. We talk about the communion of saints, all of those in the past, those here with us now today, and all of those still to come into the larger universal church. We’re the mid-packers and the ones bringing up the rear; the ones running short distances or long, muddling along through the course as we go.

This is where the term starts getting a little baggier, of course. If we have heroic saints, and saints we loved and lost, and we’re all saints too, then – wait, what does it mean to be a saint?

Thomas Merton, the midcentury Catholic theologian and writer, describes a conversation in his first memoir The Seven Storey Mountain. M[...]

Audio only

RCL Year B, Proper 24

Have you ever asked a really stupid question, and then regretted it almost immediately? Or have you ever asked for something and then realized you didn’t know what to do with it when you got it? Have you ever sat quietly, afraid to ask a question at all for fear others will laugh at you? If so, then this gospel is for you.

Jesus’ disciples had been traveling with Jesus for a while, and he’d had a lot to say – but lately all he seemed to talk about was this stuff about the Son of Man being betrayed and killed and rising again. The first time he’d said it, Peter had taken him aside and argued with him about it, but Jesus’ reaction was so strong (‘Get behind me, Satan!’) that even Peter wouldn’t try that again. The second time Jesus told them this is what would happen, they just kept silent, even though they were all confused. And then Jesus set off toward Jerusalem with all of them in tow, and no one dared question him on this – but with all of the authorities angry at him, Jerusalem seemed like the last place he should go. And on the road, Jesus told them for the third time that the Son of Man would be handed over and condemned to death and killed, and then would rise again.

James and John, the brothers, had clearly been thinking this over. The part about being betrayed and mocked and killed all sounded pretty bad, but Jesus seemed so sure of himself and so clear that they were all going to Jerusalem, like it or not, that they figured he must have a trick or two up his sleeve. And it must be in that part he kept saying about rising again after three days. That sounded good, that sounded triumphant and Messiah-like, with lots of fanfare and glory. James and John wanted in on that. So after this third time of Jesus telling them the news, they strode forward to him and placed their request. It seemed perfectly reasonable to them to ask it.

The Gospel of Mark never gives the disciples a break. All of the disciples are portrayed as just plain stupid throughout the whole story, asking all the wrong questions, getting the point completely wrong, tagging along after Jesus without any sense of what they’re supposed to be doing. And then finally, after all their boastful assurances of courage and fidelity, all of them, every last one, take off and run away at the end. Only Mary Magdalene and a few other women disciples are left there at the cross – but they too clearly don’t understand what’s going on and run off afraid when the angel tells them the news of Jesus’ resurrection. And that’s the end of the gospel – such a strange, sad ending to what should be a triumphant story that a few people tried writing better endings to Mark over the centuries where it isn’t all quite so harsh. But in the original, the disciples are a pretty sad lot.

So James and John are just acting according to type, really. They walk up and ask Jesus for the best places in the kingdom, to sit on his right and on his left, confidently nodding yes to his questions and asserting that they are able to do whatever Jesus does. Of course, Jesus tells them that they have no idea what they’re talking about, for the suffering will be far greater than they comprehend. The rest of the group gets upset at James and John, naturally – so Jesus explains to all of them yet again that the world’s ideas of power don’t work here in this community, that power is completely redefined and different with Jesus, experienced as self-giving love and service, not dominating over other people in glory. And apparently, the disciples nod and smile and then forget it all over again.

In this exchange like so many others, I have to wonder why Jesus selected the people he did to be his disciples. Why do they have to hear this stuff again and again? Why are they so dumb? Why doesn’t Jesus trade them in for a new set of friends who get what he’s on about?

Of course, the stupidity of the disciples allows Jesus to offer a teaching about what leadership should look like in the[...]

RCL Year B, Proper 23

That poor man. He does everything right. He is a good citizen, he obeys the laws, he worships God. He honors his parents and is polite to strangers. But he knows something is missing. Something is lacking, and he can’t name what it is. So he runs up to Jesus, this radical itinerant preacher and healer coming through his town, and asks him, what else should I do? Help me know what I’m missing, Jesus. And Jesus looks at him and loves him, and says, what you’re missing is love and trust, my friend; let your wealth go so you can love others and trust in God, and you will lack for nothing any longer. And the man is shocked, and so are Jesus’ disciples.

This story tends to stick in our craw a bit.  That man could be any of us. We do everything right, pretty much. We are good citizens and churchgoers and we don’t murder people, and everything should be well. Only that’s not enough – and we know it’s not enough. There’s a deeper kind of relationship God wants for us, and that we want to have. Just like that man, Jesus wants to love us into more. But yikes, what a scary way to do it.

Now before we go further, there’s one myth about this text that we need to dispel. Jesus tells his disciples that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.  If that image sounds utterly ludicrous and impossible, that’s because it’s supposed to. There was no tiny gate called ‘the eye of the needle’ that camels used to go through into Jerusalem – that’s a medieval legend not founded on fact. There’s a similar expression in a Talmudic text that talks about an elephant passing through the eye of a needle. The expression means, something that’s impossible. This is not something that’s possible if only we put the bags down, or walk through on our knees, or do something else the right way. The point of the phrase Jesus uses is: it’s impossible. It is not possible, Jesus says, for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Why? He doesn’t say. But given other things Jesus says, it seems like the problem lies in where you put your trust, and how you care for others. With too much money, it’s all too easy to trust in that alone, and to be cushioned from others’ needs. With too much money, chances are there are others who don’t have enough. But this is a hard lesson for us, and for the listeners of Jesus’ time. Which is why Jesus’ disciples, stupefied, ask, Who then can be saved?? And Jesus says, with God, all things are possible. At the end of this difficult, difficult teaching, Jesus gives us an out – the good news and the reminder that God’s grace is the only thing that makes our salvation possible. After all, no one is good but God alone.

We’d better hold onto that grace, because this task we’re set is so hard that none of us can do it perfectly. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Jesus’ words to the rich man are words for all of us if we want to go deeper in our faith. As I said last week, what we do with our money is a sign of where we are with God – and it’s a sign, too, of how well we love our neighbors. It’s there in how we spend our money, and it’s there in how we give it away.

We already know that the way we spend our money has a great impact on our neighbor. In our global market, we often don’t know where our goods come from, when our clothes are made overseas and our food is grown elsewhere and even our tech support phone calls go to someplace halfway around the world. But with a little effort, it’s possible to find out – and I think as a culture we’re slowly becoming more aware of it. We all depend on the labor of others for our food, our clothing, our homes, our cars, our roads, everything. What those workers are paid and where the materials come from to make the products, all of that is part of what we buy when we buy something, or when we invest in something. Those workers and all of those involved in production are our neighbors, whether we know them[...]

RCL Year B, Proper 22

Oh, there is SO much to say about all of those scripture readings.

 

But instead, it’s time to talk about money. Yes, it’s October, time for our collective attention to turn to giving and pledging to the church. Next week you will receive your pledge packet with a pledge card to return, and on the Sunday After All Saints, November 4, we will bring them back to church and offer them on the altar.

 

Now how do you feel as we come into this time at church? Excited and joyful at another opportunity for giving? Dreading the same old conversations with the same old people about something so awkward and unspiritual? Indifferent, because it won’t apply to you anyway? Anxious, because there’s just not enough money to go around and no one likes to talk about it?

 

A few years ago I attended CREDO, an 8-day conference for clergy trying to get our lives in order for us. At the conference, the presenter on financial planning was a bouncy, happy laywoman from Arizona named Phyllis. On the day we started talking about finance, she jumped up and said, I want to teach you how to have FUN WITH MONEY! We all looked at her in disbelief. Fun?? Whoever said money could be fun?

 

Because money usually isn’t fun for clergy. Money at church is always a source of anxiety and tension. The budget has a deficit. It’s a big deficit! No, it’s not that big a deficit. People don’t give enough to keep things going here. No, wait, this year giving is up, and we’re going in a good direction! But oh no, the roof started leaking and there goes the money. (Not to mention that you hear all the most intimate and gory details of your parishioners’ last hospital visit, but ack! don’t ask them to talk about money!) And that doesn’t even go into all the issues with the clergy person’s personal finance: the bills, the small paycheck, the years of debt from going to seminary, panic about retirement income. And then pledge season comes around and it’s time to be a model of giving for the congregation!! And there was Phyllis telling us all, have fun with money.

 

But she was right. Like anything else, if you let go of some the anxiety, the fun quotient goes up. You stop worrying, you can start enjoying. And yes, it’s possible, I learned. No matter how little or how much money you have. It’s possible to have fun with it. We just need to do three things: Decide there is enough. Learn about it so it’s not so scary. Hold it lightly and give some away.

 

Let’s look at those one by one. First, deciding that there actually is enough. That’s a basic one. Jesus is always preaching and teaching about abundance and how the kingdom of God has more than enough to go around. The little mustard seed taking over the whole field with bushes. The twelve baskets of leftovers after 5000 people eat five loaves of bread. “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap.” There’s a constant drumbeat throughout all of scripture that when we trust God with our whole selves, we will have enough. But like the hummingbirds I talked about a few weeks back, with the whole bottle of sugar water and endless fights about it, we tend to fear that that’s not true.

 

I was backpacking a few weeks ago in the Sierras, and this year it is dryer than a bone up there. I knew I had to do my hike from lake to lake, because very little water is running in the streambeds. So the first day I stopped at the first lake about 4 miles in and got my filter out to pump water. After about a half-liter, the pump quit working. And then I remembered that the cartridge needed to be changed, and I hadn’t checked it before leaving. So there I was, just started on my trip, thinking I’d have to turn around and head out and very very angry about it. But then I remembered that I’d seen a little bottle of iodine pills in the emergency kit I’d thrown in the backpack – and yes, they were [...]

RCL Year B, Proper 18

All around us, kids have gone back to school. Today our Sunday School began. So I want us to think about school today, too. Remember, if you will, when you were in junior high school. Take a moment and think of it. Where did you fit in when you were in junior high? Were you one of the popular ones? Were you one of the nerds? Were you a sporty jock type? Or were you one of those kids who just wanted to keep playing Legos and couldn’t understand why all your friends were talking about going on dates? Junior high. It’s the very essence of social awkwardness, worse even than high school.

I’ll tell you about my experience. When I was in junior high, my school district started changing to the middle school model, from schools of 7th-9th graders to schools of 6th-8th graders. So I finished Woodridge Elementary School at the end of 6th grade, having gone to school with the same kids since kindergarten. And all of us same kids started going to Hyak Junior High, just down the hill from our elementary school. Only there were other kids there too, all these big mature 9th graders. I still remember how big the 9th grade cheerleaders looked to me. I struggled. I tried to learn how to do my hair and wear makeup, but I was really still a little kid with glasses. But then that year the district decided to close Hyak. So all of us 7th graders scattered, redistricted into other schools that had already changed over into middle schools. So now instead of the little kid at Hyak Junior High, I was in the top class of Odle Middle School, an 8th grader. I got contacts and a perm. And I fell in with a great group of friends, girls who were smart and funny and not totally ignored by the boys – not the popular kids, but still cool enough. It was a great year. And then it ended. And we scattered again, and all of those girls I’d been friends with went to Sammamish High School, and I went to Bellevue High School, where the mean girls were not only mean, but really rich. It never got better after that.

In junior high you’re never really secure in your status. Even if you’re in the popular crowd, things can change. Your family moves to a new town. You switch schools. You do your hair wrong one day or buy the wrong color backpack, and all of a sudden you’re not in anymore, you’re out. It’s a brutal scene.

Now fast forward to the present. You’re part of a wonderful church community at ECA. What a relief. All of those bad times of being excluded and a misfit are behind you. Now people want you to sit at their table at coffee hour. They call you, they visit you in the hospital, they care about you and your kids and grandkids. This church does this stuff really well. Every single person who talks about why they started coming to ECA names the community as a major reason. It is warm and friendly and welcoming and people really care for each other, through good times and bad.

Except there’s another side to this community here, of course. Because some of you have also shared stories or concerns about people not being included as well. There are times when you don’t get invited to sit at that table, or when you’re in the hospital and no one calls, or especially, times in coffee hour when no one talks to you. I’ve heard the word ‘cliquey’ used to describe this church. And sometimes, unfortunately, I think it’s true.

Now before you go feeling all bad about this, I want to say two things. They say the role of a priest is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. So first, a word of comfort: every community has this problem. Every group of people from time to time, inadvertently or intentionally, leaves somebody out. It’s human nature. We make friends with people who are like us – who think like us, who talk like us, who like the same things we like, even who look like us (Frances and the blond ponytail girls). It’s just something basic to our nature, the same thing that makes us group together in tribes and political parties and, [...]

RCL Year B, Proper 16

Perhaps you know this song:

 

Darling you gotta let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

If you say that you are mine

I’ll be here til the end of time

So you got to let me know

Should I stay or should I go?

Perhaps only a certain generation of us knows it – after all, the Clash recorded it in 1981. But it nicely spells out our choice in today’s gospel. After weeks of laying out the central message of the Christian gospel, Jesus, as it were, throws down the gauntlet. I am the bread of life. I give up my own life so that you can live. In order to really live, you need to trust in my self-giving love, and follow in my way. Can you accept this or not? Are you staying or going?

A whole group shuffles off, embarrassed. Another, smaller, group stays. Peter says, where else are we supposed to go? Meanwhile, Judas makes plans to leave, regardless.

How about you? Are you in, or are you out?

Decisions, decisions. How are you at making decisions? Some folks have no problem with decisions. They don’t dither very long about whether option A or B is right, they just want the matter settled. So they choose and commit, moving ahead without qualms. I’m the decider; off we go. Other people hate indecision so much that they choose too quickly, and then later regret their choice, maybe even try to wriggle out of it and do something else. Sill others agonize over the decision all the way through, and even years later, they go back and rehash whether it was the right one. I’m probably a mix of the first two; my husband is the third one. So I’m the one who moves ahead more quickly and with certainty – I plan the calendar months in advance – but I’m also the one who has last-minute freak-outs, like the panic attacks I had before we got married and moved east. (Panic attacks in church, mind you, while preaching. Not fun.) And I’m also the one with the late-night worries about whether the choice we just made was right after all. While Jim is the one who in times of trial revisits the long-ago decisions like a favorite bone: I never should have left academia. I never should have moved from LA. And he takes his time with the big decisions – it took us a while to get engaged, he took his time joining the church. Neither of us is only one or the other, but we do have our usual patterns.

We all do decisions differently. And when it comes to the faith life, it’s still more complicated. At ECA, several adults and youth have been meeting in classes and thinking through questions on the way to baptism and confirmation this fall. We’ve been talking about how confirmation is a chance to decide as an adult whether you want to claim this tradition. Maybe you were baptized as a baby and other people made the decision for you, and now it’s time to make it for yourself. Or maybe you were raised in another tradition, or in no church, and now you feel it’s time to commit to this one. An adult decision does make a difference: many who are baptized as an infant drift away from the church later. Those from churches who don’t believe in infant baptism talk about how meaningful it was to make the decision themselves as a teenager or adult, choosing for themselves to be baptized. But even that is no guarantee of permanent commitment – plenty of folks choose at one time in their lives to be baptized or confirmed, only to step away from church later for years on end. And then perhaps something changes again, and back they come. None of us makes a once-for-all decision when it comes to faith. Whether it’s liturgical baptism or a late-night prayer accepting Jesus as savior, the path that follows is never a perfectly linear one – we’re in and out all the time. It’s why I never know how to answer when someone asks, have you been saved? Where and when? I always want to say, I’m in the process of being saved, right here and right now.

Given our problems with decisions, maybe it’s helpful to look at just what choice Jesus is asking his followers, [...]

RCL Year B, Proper 15

 

Before I begin this sermon, I want you to stop and remember a meal. Not just any meal. I want you to remember a meal you had, big or small, that tasted really, really good. Maybe it was a fancy meal out at a restaurant; maybe it was something simpler made at home. Remember how it tasted; remember the circumstances; have it all over again in your mind.

Got it? Mmm. Yummy!

There are a lot of meals that come to my mind, but one that stands out is this one: after 24 hours of labor with my first child, during which I was allowed only clear liquids (and I hate Jello), I was presented with a turkey sandwich. Two pieces of whole wheat bread with a wad of thin-sliced turkey meat in between, and a tube of mayonnaise on the side. I smeared the mayonnaise on the bread, and I ate the sandwich. I have never, before or since, had a sandwich that tasted that good.

Now, maybe you remember something a lot more fancy and gourmet than that. Maybe you remember sparkling company and witty conversation, loving hands preparing the food, candlelight and music and all of those other things besides the food that make a meal special. But that turkey sandwich stood out for me for none of those reasons. It stood out because when I ate it, I was really, really hungry.

So why have I got you thinking about food? We just heard more from the gospel of John (and we’re not done yet) about food, about how Jesus is the bread of life. The people around Jesus, who were listening to him go on and on about being the bread of life, I would wager were thinking about food. They were people who knew what it was like to be hungry. Peasants, soldiers, merchants, fishermen. If they were to eat, they had to do a lot of work to get and then prepare the food. There were no corner stores to buy it in; there was never too much of it; there was rarely enough of it. Certainly the poor suffered hunger as they do now; but even those more well off did not have the over-abundance of food that we are used to. So, many among Jesus’ audience were probably hungry while they were listening to Jesus and his metaphor about living bread. And his metaphor in today’s reading gets even more graphic: Eat my flesh and drink my blood. And Jesus doesn’t just say ‘eat’ in the original Greek, but gnaw, chew my flesh, rip it off the bone and crunch on it. We might think, Ew. They thought, ew. But at the same time, a hungry person accustomed to scarcity, listening to that language about eating, chewing, drinking, being filled and satisfied and satiated with plenty – that would go pretty deeply into that person’s hearing. They would not forget Jesus’ words. They would feel in their bones what he was offering them, how deeply God’s love would nourish them.

For us, however, we have a hard time entering the mental space of being really and truly hungry. I’m sure most of us have felt hunger, after a long walk or in the morning before breakfast. But we are surrounded by an abundance of food all the time, a glut of food really. Our obesity rates are at epidemic levels because we have so much cheap, readily available food all around us, right there to pop in our mouths every time we want it. We don’t even really notice being hungry, often enough. We just eat because it’s time to do so, or because there’s nothing else to do. We don’t have to do much work to get the food, and we can always eat too much of it. So while we can all understand hunger, and the deeper message of spiritual hunger that Jesus is getting at, ‘the bread of life’ doesn’t hit in the visceral way that I think it must have hit his first-century listeners.

So I wonder, what is it that we lack and crave so much that Jesus could speak to us as compellingly as this? What is it that we always feel scarce of, that if Jesus could offer it to us we would say yes gladly and with our whole heart? Well, I have one answer for this, though perhaps you have others. I’m thinking of time. We never have enough of it. We always wa[...]