"Who Do You Say That I Am?"

Sheepscott Community Church September 20, 2009

Jeremiah 11: 18-20

James 3: 13-4: 3, 7-8a

Mark 9: 30-37

“Who Do You Say That I Am?”

I had thought to “save” the subject of this message for our first Sunday down at the Valley Church, which will be October 4. But then I thought, saving the subject would be exactly what I was preaching against last Sunday. It is not to save and hoard, but to spend and risk life and everything else for God and be in the moment with the idea when it happens. So, I throw caution to the winds and offer these thoughts, connecting them where I can to today’s scripture.

Several of us were talking at the back of the church last Sunday after service, and someone noted that of all the residents in the houses in the development where they live, only one other person went to church. The objection they had heard raised to that seemingly increasingly outdated tradition of going to church on Sunday was primarily that what happens at church is the result of a design by a group of men at some point in history, a religious exercise rendered meaningless in this more enlightened time. Spirituality is a more acceptable term than religiousness or religiosity and doesn’t require that one make any great efforts in the worship department. One can set one’s own agenda about how and when to worship.

I have wanted to talk again, about why we come to church––but I thought it would be like preaching to the choir because those who are in attendance don’t need to hear it. But someone else in the small group at the back of the church said that it would be good to be reminded why we come.

Fair enough. Let’s start there, borrowing the sentiment of the choir’s usual Introit once again: “Surely the Presence of the Lord Is in This Place.” All of us could testify individually how that happens for us, and I expect that for some it would be the music; for others it would be the prayer together; for others it could be the reading of scripture out loud or the message for the day. Still others are blessed simply by being in this building where generations before them, before all of us, have worshipped together. Being caught up in that holy history that praises God in whom there is no time as we know it is almost unspeakably glorious. For me I experience the presence of the Lord in this place through all of those manifestations, but more than any other way, it’s in you-all, the people who come together. I do see Christ in you and that gives me hope for myself.

What about you? Why do you come? Are you affirmed in your faith when you come? Are you challenged in your faith? Do you want more or do you want not to be bothered, to be challenged less?

Let’s turn to today’s gospel and see if we an ferret out some answers or at least a sense of direction in our thinking about why we should bother with this exercise of worship at all. Jesus and his disciples have left the safety of the North around Tyre and Sidon, where Jesus has been spending a protracted period of time with his followers before heading toward Jerusalem and what awaited him there. We most recently heard Peter confess that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. Shortly after that he remonstrated with Jesus when Jesus said what was going to happen to him in Jerusalem, viz., he would suffer many things, be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed and raised up on the third day. “God forbid that should happen to you,” Peter said.

In today’s gospel Jesus is predicting his passion again. The difference this time is that he added one phrase: “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men,” which was a reference to the traitor in the little band––Judas. Jesus was not only announcing a fact, he was giving a warning and making a last appeal to the man in whose heart the purpose of betrayal was taking shape.

The disciples did not understand it because they didn’t want to understand the what and wherefore of what was going to happen to Jesus. He was speaking plainly, but they were left scratching their heads, and when Jesus went on ahead of them, they returned to a regular topic of conversation: who would be the greatest among them when Jesus came into his power? Who would make up his kitchen cabinet? We human beings have a great ability and capacity for self-deception when we need to employ it. Often it’s because we just can’t face some awful truth––like the death of Jesus––while we can make plans on the temporal plane about what we will do to establish our importance.

When they all arrived home in Capernaum, Jesus had them sit down, and he himself sat down, which is the position a Rabbi will take when he is going to teach his disciples, his followers. His question to them no doubt had the most sensitive among them turning red in the face with shame and embarrassment, and none of them meeting his eye, which could see right through them. “What were you talking about on the road?” he asked. He knew very well what they had been talking about and recognized this as a teachable moment. Their red faces were indicative of a repentance in shame that would make them more receptive to what he had to say. If these twelve didn’t get it, didn’t have at least a glimmer of who he was and why he had come––and actually, there were only eleven who were fully open to what Jesus had to say––what would he do? So he had to seize this moment to try to get across a major point.

And he made that point by picking up a child who was nearby and setting the child in their midst. Jesus took the child in his arms and said to the disciples, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” In a parallel passage that follows shortly after in Mark 10, Jesus is indignant when the disciples try to prevent the children from coming to him and says to them, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who does not receive the kingdom like a little child will never enter it.” Then he picked up the children in his arms and blessed them.

We need to recognize that this kingdom of God to which Jesus was inviting his listeners was apparently a kingdom of nobodies, emphasized by his use of children as embodiments of who and what we need to be in order to enter the kingdom. Children are nobodies in most societies, and most certainly at that time in history that was true. They have no power and are almost totally dependent on others to care for them. The lifting up of the children was a rebuke of the pretensions of the disciples, who wanted to assume first places and thereby regulate access to the Kingdom of God.

That makes me think of the years of Christianity just after Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, shortly before he died. Those who had assumed power in the church that was forming in the fourth century were all atwitter about the great unwashed who were then flooding through the gates into the Kingdom of God. They wanted to bar the gate and only let in those who could prove that they knew the right answers to the right questions. But the scale of influx made this impossible. When a whole empire goes Christian, or any other religion for that matter, it gets a little hard to keep track of who has a stamp on the hand and can get into the dance. Can’t you just hear the power brokers: “Oh, that makes me so mad.”

Of course, God was keeping track, and they need not have gotten all fussed about it. The disciples were all wanting to be gatekeepers, having not accepted, as I earlier pointed out, that their leader was heading down a road of no return, and the exercise of their idea of power was not on his mind. On the contrary, he was trying to teach the disciples about powerlessness, as embodied in children, to give them an idea of what was down that road for them, of what they had to embrace if they expected to be part of the Kingdom of God.

Do you remember the story of the Brothers of Thunder, James and John, whose mother buttonholed Jesus to ask if her sons would sit at his right and left hands? We human beings being what we are, like James and John, and like the other disciples on the road, are reluctant to let go of the perks, the bennies that come with being associated with celebrity. I have to interject this piece of wisdom here that I got from a dean I was working with when I was at Bates; I may have shared this with you before, but it bears repeating. Early on she said, if you don’t care who gets the credit, you can get a lot done. Truer words, etcetera.

The disciples had to learn how to be like children, to be nobodies as far as the world’s estimation is concerned, and thereby, somebodies in God’s eyes. They had to learn to be humble, as children are humble, just by virtue of being children. It was the total receptivity of children that Jesus was praising, and for his disciples too, the implication was that they must be equally receptive in their wholehearted devotion to the only aim finally worth pursuing––admission to the Kingdom of God. Our self-love, our self-regard has to be replaced by love for all who are our companions in this work, in our aim, in our struggles, which brings me back to where I began: This community, struggling toward its identity as a house of God, where all can come to worship together in peace and joy and sorrow, caring for one another and celebrating the life we share in God. We have fallen short. We do fall short, but we have an intercessor––I’m talking about Jesus––who can shore us up and encourage us in our best selves in the way we want to go.

I repeat the question I began with: Why do we come together here on a Sunday morning? Why don’t we stay in bed or finish the Times crossword by noon or communicate with all our friends on Facebook who are not at church either? Why are you here? What do you have to bring? What do you hope to take away?

Over the next two weeks, think about your status vis-à-vis God. Would you be ashamed if Jesus were to ask you what you were thinking about at any given time? How far have you come in your hope to live a better life, to give, not counting the cost to yourself but the benefit to the Body of Christ? Many of us are still far from accepting the radical demands of Jesus’s message, to become like children, transparent to the Spirit of God, ready to be taught.

If we do indeed find ourselves falling far short of not only what we want of ourselves before God, but also what God makes clear when we are willing to listen, what God wants of us, if we do find ourselves thus falling short in a given area, repent. Tell God you’re sorry and that you will try harder with the help of the Spirit of Jesus to become the person, the child who can enter the kingdom with the sweet trust that characterizes a child.

When we have our own kids, there’s so much worry and broken bones and trouble at school, and all that that goes with it, that sometimes we lose sight of their preciousness, and especially when they’re younger, their innocence. Our grandkids can pick up a lot of that slack. For me, when I’ve had the opportunity to talk with the kids up here, to look at their sweet faces and indeed to sense their receptivity, as I mentioned earlier, I have no doubt of what preciousness in God’s eyes is, and the desirability for us of that same state of mind and heart, of being before God They are our models..

Would that we could be like those children. God expects us to be. But how can we? We are no longer children, and we are jaded, somewhat cynical, and not easily led. I am reminded of Nicodemus saying to Jesus, who has said he must be born again of water and of the Spirit to enter the kingdom of God, how can that happen? Can I crawl back up into my mother’s womb? Well, no. But we can be born again of the Spirit; we can be new, recover our innocence in ways we won’t discover until we trust God more and our self-seeking selves less.

Let us ask ourselves the question why we come here. Let us consider where we have fallen short in our own movement forward in grace and repent where we have need of repentance––and here I would mention that we are in the holiest part of the Jewish year, Rosh Hashanah which began Friday, and ends with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on September 28. Rosh Hashanah, which translates literally as “head of the year,” is an opportunity through prayer and reflection for self-repair. The Jewish people remember their past year and ask for forgiveness through repentance. And they always say, “we” in the prayers, not just “I.” They repent communally. We will be doing that in our prayer of confession and pardon before communion on our first Sunday at the Valley Church. Let us reflect in preparation over these next two weeks about ourselves as church––where we have fallen short, why we come together, where we want to go. If we genuinely seek God in these matters, God’s Spirit will guide us like children in the most beautiful and subtle ways.

That can happen in community, the community of this worshipping body whose members are coming more and more fully into relationship with each other, which is to say with Christ through each other. If we continue to choose to grow as a community in Christ, our individual gifts will be released like balloons at a political convention and we can build up this community on the foundation that is already in place. Amen.

To Lose a Life Is to Save a Life

Sheepscott Community Church September 13, 2009

Isaiah 50: 4-9a

James 3: 1-12

Mark 8: 27-38

To Lose a Life Is to Save a Life

Several points of today’s gospel reading lie at the heart of Christianity. Perhaps none is more central than Jesus’ statement, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it.” This is addressed to us as surely as it was to the disciples and the crowd that was with Jesus that day.

The message is that God gave us life to spend, not to keep or hoard. If we live carefully, always thinking of our own profit, ease, comfort, security, if our sole aim is to make life as long and as trouble-free as possible, if we will make no effort except for ourselves, we are losing life all the time. But, if we spend life for others, if we forget health, wealth, time and comfort in our desire to do something for Jesus and so, for those for whom he lived, and died, and lives, then we are gaining life, winning life, saving our lives all the time because it is for Jesus and the gospel’s sake that we do what we do.

But not simply. Saying it that way has the hollow ring of duty and ideology. I believe that while we do act out for Jesus’ sake and the gospel, it is because we want to. We do it out of love, God’s divine love working through our own human love that grows through our ongoing choices.

What would have happened in the world if scientists and inventors had not taken risks, even sometimes with their own bodies, to find cures for disease and improve the lives of other human beings? And that’s only one category of people. What about mothers and fathers who say no to themselves and yes, not only to their own children, but to the children of others to coach them in sports or to teach them in music or languages or art. Or to be Girl Scout or Boy Scout leaders and take them to places they might not otherwise see? Introduce them to the world they might not otherwise come in contact with? What if instead they had chosen to stay home and watch Melrose Place? The very essence of life is in risking and spending it, not in saving and hoarding it.

An extreme example of such a risk taker, such a life-spender is a fourth-century monk named Telemachus. He had retired early on to the desert in an Eastern country to be alone in prayer, meditation and fasting. He never sought anything but contact with God. But he felt like something was missing, something wasn’t quite right, and one day as he rose from prayer, he got it. He realized that his life was based not on selfless love but on selfish love of God. If he would serve God, he must serve others. The desert might be a good place to prepare for a life of service by coming to terms with personal strengths and weaknesses, as did John the Baptist and Jesus, but then it is time to leave the desert, to go out among others, to find a way to be of service in the larger human community.

Telemachus had been touched by the Spirit of God both to enter the desert and in time to leave the desert. He set out for Rome, then, the greatest city in the world, and which, by that time was officially, nominally Christian following the edict of the late Emperor Constantine. What must Telemachus’s surprise have been when he followed along the victory procession of the general Stilicho through the streets of Rome, only to arrive at the coliseum, where gladiatorial games were being held to honor the general and his victories. It seemed that although the Christians were no longer being fed to the lions for the amusement of the populace, the gladiators who had been captured in war had to fight and kill each other in order to bring the holiday mood of the city to its full crescendo.

As Telemachus found his way into the area of the arena with the others, the chariot races were finishing up, and the gladiators were preparing to fight. They advanced into the arena with the greeting, “Hail, Caesar! [This was Honorius Caesar.] We who are about to die salute you!” The fighting began and Telemachus was horrified that these men, for whom in his view Christ had died, were now killing each other to amuse a supposedly Christian populace. As the story goes, according to the account written by Theodoret of Cyrus in The Ecclesiastical History, “he [Telemachus] went himself into the stadium, and stepping down into the arena, endeavored to stop the men who were wielding their weapons against one another.

“The spectators of the slaughter were indignant,” he went on, “and inspired by the triad fury of the demon who delights in these bloody deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death. When the admirable emperor [Honorius] was informed of this, he numbered Telemachus in the number of victorious martyrs, and put an end to that impious spectacle.”

A more popular account is considerably more dramatic, wherein Telemachus stood between the gladiators, and for a moment they stopped––shades of the lone man standing in front of the tank in Tianneman Square––but the crowd roared and the gladiators pushed the old man in the hermit’s robe aside and resumed fighting. Again he came between them, and the crowd began to throw stones at him and urged the gladiators to kill him and get him out of the way. At the flash of a gladiator’s sword, Telemachus lay dead, and the crowd went silent. They were suddenly shocked that a holy man should die in such a way and apparently understood and internalized what this larger exercise of killing meant.

The gladiatorial games actually historically ended that day, and they never began again. Telemachus, by his dying, had ended them. As Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said of him, “His death was more useful to mankind that his life.” By losing his life he had done more than he ever could have done had he remained husbanding that same life out in the desert. God gave us life to spend and not to keep.

Don’t panic. It’s unlikely that you will have a comparable experience. More likely is the example I offered earlier of the coaching dad who spends hours every week as a volunteer, helping not only his kids’ teams but those of other parents’ kids as well. How about those who serve on the town school board or fill the less-than-desirable post of animal control officer? How about our own choir, who again under Carroll’s direction, offered their gift of song to those at the supper at Second Congregational Church, on Wednesday night? What about teachers who every year spend out of their own pockets to ensure that the kids have what they need for supplies and little extras in this tight economy? That is not hanging on to our lives in their several dimensions, including the economic dimension, until our knuckles are white. Exercise fiscal sense, yes, so you don’t necessarily become dependent on the state, although that can happen no matter how careful we think we’ve been, exercise good sense, but open your hands. Let the life and the wherewithal flow out of your hands, through your hands. That is God’s way.

Let me bring up another name that lends itself to today’s gospel in this area of economic considerations: E. F. Schumacher. You may recognize his name as the author of the now-classic, Small Is Beautiful. A prophet in the guise of an economist and philosopher, Schumacher was born in 1911 in Germany and went to England in the 1930s as a Rhodes scholar. He was detained there as an enemy alien during World War II and was sent to work on a farm in rural northern England. That experience of common productive labor influenced his formation as an economist. During that sojourn he also had a Christian conversion experience.

In verse 36 of this morning’s gospel, Jesus asks, “What good is it, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul, his life? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul, for his life?” Schumacher was asking that question in his work, having come to it after the war when he worked as an economic advisor to the British Control Commission in Germany and as head of planning of the British Coal Board. He came to believe that traditional economics, despite its scientific pretensions, was really a kind of religion in which growth, efficiency and production were the ultimate measures of value. In this way economists ignored the spiritual dimensions of human beings while promoting a civilization potentially headed for catastrophe.

In Small Is Beautiful, published in 1973, and subtitled “Economics as if People Mattered,” Schumacher described an economy regulated by concern for permanence, equality, reduction of desires, the alleviation of suffering, the respect for beauty, and the dignity of work. He implicitly called into contrast an economic system sustained by waste, short-term savings, and the stimulation of avarice and envy. He called for a reverent rather than violent attitude to God’s handiwork. Do you see the connection between what he thought, what he wrote and what he did? How do we take care of one another across the board? God gave us life to spend and not to keep. Risk and spend life, not save and hoard it.

So Schumacher, who gave his life to study and thought and hard work that continues to benefit us with its visionary approach to the ecological evolution of our interconnected systems based on economics, Schumacher was like Telemachus, who had no intention of giving up his life that day in the arena and changing Roman history and so, our inherited history. For both men, I think it was being in and with God in the moment, like Jesus, saying yes to the call. Telemachus had had his years of preparation in the desert, like Jesus’ days, and Schumacher had had his years in the “desert” of rural England where he came to know himself and his relation to God in a way he had not before.

It’s important to note that God’s scope is not limited to our view of what theology is or church or even church in the world. God simply is, as he said of himself to Moses: I Am Who Am. God is Being and sustains all life in himself. Without the breath of his spirit we are not. And so, God doesn’t limit Godself to our ideas or rules or roles. As the scripture says in John 3: 8: “The wind blows where it will. You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

A third focus in this morning’s gospel is Jesus’ rebuke of Peter, who in response to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” answered, “You are the Christ.” After Peter made that confession, Jesus spoke about what lay before him in Jerusalem: suffering, death and resurrection. Peter immediately remonstrated with Jesus, “God forbid that should happen to you.” Jesus’ response was quick and angry: “Get behind me you Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men.” Jesus’ anger can be attributed to the fact that he was dealing with what he knew he had to face. He didn’t want to die, and he knew he had powers he could use for conquest. Peter had voiced the temptations that Jesus himself was having in his humanity, a redux of what had happened in the desert, following his baptism and leading to his public life.

How can we be with a friend or a family member who is facing a difficult time in a more helpful way than Peter was with Jesus? Whether that “difficult time” means loss of life, as Jesus was facing, while hoping for some understanding if not some consolation from his friends, loss of health, a job, a relationship. Peter’s response to Jesus is usually what our first knee-jerk response is: God forbid this should happen to you. Not what the person needs to hear.

For example, if a person is at the end of her life and she knows it, she is no longer expecting the miracle of healing––although, as always, God being sovereign, that can happen––but if she is ready to face the end, she doesn’t need us to exclaim, “Oh no, God forbid that should happen.” She needs us to listen, to be with her, not necessarily saying a word, but just being with. This is holy listening, if you want to give it a name. This is how I believe God listens, and we are all capable of it when we get out of the way, not being self-conscious, but losing our life and letting God have God’s way with it.

I’ve seen this kind of listening and have been blessed in my life to experience it myself when I needed it. It is a great gift from one member of the the Body of Christ to another. Be quiet and listen. You know, when the choir sings in the Introit, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place”? That feels like what I’m calling “God-listening.” God can be present through us if we will allow it in the most difficult of circumstances. As hard to bear as some moments in this human life are, they are eminently more bearable when we share the burden with each other, with community as community. Amen.

The Kindness of Christ

Sheepscott Community Church September 6, 2009

Isaiah 35: 4-7a

James 2: 1-10; 14-17

Mark 7: 24-37

The Kindness of Christ

I will start with a few words about kindness from the novelist Henry James, speaking to his namesake nephew Henry, son of William James. “Three things in human life are important, Henry,” he said. “The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.”

I relate this wisdom to today’s gospel, in the verses about the deaf man who was healed. What struck me most about the story was Jesus’ thoughtfulness toward the man, when he took him aside from the crowd all by himself. It was such a tender and kind thing to do, given the man’s situation, such a human thing to do, where we can understand from Christ’s example how God an come among us in the simplest ways. The man was deaf and had a speech impediment, which often goes with the deafness because the person cannot hear himself speak. Deafness can be embarrassing for those who suffer it, not because of the sense deficit itself, but because of others’ reactions to it. Some in the crowd might have been shouting at the man who was deaf, trying to make him hear, as if that made a difference. I don’t doubt that that would have made him anxious, nervous.

So, Jesus quietly took him aside, put his fingers into the man’s ears, spit and touched his tongue. What was that about, you might wonder. For one thing, in those days, people thought that spittle or saliva had curative powers. For another, Jesus was acting out what was happening. It is interesting to note that Jesus did not always heal in the same manner. His repertoire included everything from this unusual but understandable dumb-show approach of today’s gospel, to speaking the word of authority to a paralytic, as in, “Get up, take your mat, and walk,” and the paralytic did what he was told much to the chagrin of the pharisees; to simply touching a man with leprosy and thereby healing him. Jesus was simply in the moment in the Spirit of God, with whom he was filled and who directed his surrendered life. His looking up to heaven when he spoke the the word “Ephphatha”––Be thou opened.––is a reminder of that: the One he considered his source.

In this morning’s gospel we encounter Jesus first in Tyre, in Gentile territory a long way from home. What was he doing there? If you look at a map, you’ll see that Tyre and Sidon are both in Phoenicia, and we probably all remember from elementary school that the Phoenicians were great sailors, their cities built along the Mediterranean Sea as they were. It was the Phoenicians who first figured out how to sail by the stars at night. Until that time, all boats would have to moor at night and wait for the guidance of familiar landmarks visible during the day.

Anyway, what was Jesus doing so far from home? How far? Tyre, which means The Rock, so-called because of two great rocks offshore that were joined by a 3000-foot ridge creating a natural harbor and fortress, Tyre was about 40 miles northwest of Capernaum, where Jesus lived. Sidon was 26 miles further north of Tyre and 60 miles from Capernaum. So, what brought Jesus up from Capernaum? Practically speaking, he may well have been seeking a temporary retreat from the attacks he was under at home from all sides. The Pharisees, as we heard last week, called him a sinner because he broke their rules and regulations, specific to last week’s gospel, he didn’t encourage the disciples to wash their hands before they ate. Thereby they were considered unclean in the sight of God, according to the Law. Herod considered him a menace, and in his own home town of Nazareth, they thought he was just too big for his britches.

Who cared about him were the poor and disenfranchised, who had little other hope. Do you think that speaks well of him? Can we take him seriously knowing that? If you answer the question honestly, you might get an insight into your deeper thoughts about these matters. There’s an echo of that in the epistle of James when he says, “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of he world to be rich in faith and inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?”

These poor, these are Jesus’ chosen people, and they included the Gentiles, who inhabited Phoenicia, which is part of Syria. When he went there, he went into a house and did not want anyone to know he was there because he needed some R & R. But he was found out, as he always was. So much for the retreat from attention and human need and its demands. Notably this first incident in this morning’s gospel is an interaction with a person unclean on two counts: that she was a woman, and a Gentile. A good Jew would speak to neither in this setting, but she challenged Jesus with clever repartee––she being a Greek and Greeks being notorious for their gift for repartee––and he rewarded her with the healing or deliverance of her daughter from a spirit that had been troubling her.

She was a Gentile. In last week’s gospel, we heard Jesus doing away with the distinction between clean and unclean foods. “Nothing that enters a man makes him unclean,” he said, “but it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean.” He was speaking about the designs that are in a person’s heart. Is it any accident that this incident follows chronologically in the gospel readings? Can Jesus be symbolically wiping out the difference between clean and unclean people? As I mentioned above, just as an observant Jew would never eat taboo foods, neither would he have contact with an unclean Gentile. Symbolically the Syro-Phoenician woman can stand for the whole Gentile world, which eagerly seized on the bread of heaven, which the Jews rejected and threw aside. That rejection became the opportunity for the Gentiles.

If as Gentiles we can all identify with the Syro-Phoenician woman, notice that she didn’t come on with “You owe me.” Rather, she argued for the crumbs that dropped from the table, not claiming to be anything other than a dog, who in that capacity could have at least those crumbs. I should note that in spite of Jesus’ seeming sharp words, because of the word he used for dog, there was probably an affectionate tone and smile between him and the woman. The word he used implied a much-loved and petted lap dog, not the more commonly used word for dog, whose meaning was closer to that of the word we use for a female dog nowadays, and which I really don’t want to say in church. We, through the mercy of God and in the boldness of the woman’s expression, do not have to settle for the crumbs. Look. We have the whole loaf, which we in our several beliefs will share as communion this orning, remembering the Christ. We out-of-towners, we less-than-ners, we Gentile believers grafted on to the root of Jesse, we can have the whole loaf.

One scholar thinks that this long journey, on foot through Syro-Phoenicia took up to eight months. It is a time of long communion between Jesus and his disciples before the storm breaks over the end of his life. It is the peace before that storm. After he left Tyre, he went further north to Sidon, and thence south to the area of the Decapolis, where he cured the man who was deaf whom we earlier heard about. That story shows us clearly that Jesus did not consider the man a “case.” No, he considered him an individual, a man with a special need and a special problem. Jesus dealt with him in a way that spared his feelings, in a way that he––the man––could understand. As Mark Twain said, “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” The closer we draw to God in Jesus, by our choice, the more we can partake of his holiness, which is marked by this great kindness and sensitivity.

But Jesus isn’t going to do all the work in this department. We have to resist the real temptation to for example send someone up for laughs to the amusement of others. Have you ever been unkind in that way? It doesn’t feel good, does it? Not really. But it’s so easy. More difficult is to hold the tongue back from speaking the sarcastic, rueful word that will make you the toast of the group for some minutes at someone else’s expense. I have the feeling––and it is a feeling; it doesn’t rise or sink to the level of full-blown theology ––that when we do choose to rein in our tongues, when we do choose kindness rather than passing popularity, Someone notices, and there is a turning toward us, and a looking at us, that if we were able to fully look back, would probably frighten us to death with its beauty.

Other, perhaps easier acts of Christlike kindness can be as simple as smiling at a stranger, offering a compliment, opening a door, letting someone out into traffic, offering to help an overwrought young mother in the grocery store. What does any of this cost us except a moment of saying yes to someone else? I wonder if when we do these things, we become like the deaf man whom Jesus healed, who then hears as he has not heard before, or like the man born blind who sees. Acting out Christ, we may be healed in the process in unexpected ways.

After Jesus healed the deaf man, the people who gathered around were filled with amazement and said, “He has done everything well,” which was the same thing that scripture says of God in Genesis 1: 31: “God saw all that he had made and it was very good.” This is God’s verdict on his own creation in the beginning. It had been good, and then sin spoiled it. Came Jesus with healing in his wings, and creation began all over again. It was righted, and we are invited to continue the righting of this new creation. Insofar as we accept the invitation and respond, we will be acting with Christ and in his stead with kindness, always kindness, patience, gentleness, forbearance. We are enabled in this task by the food and drink we will share this morning––Christ himself in the sacrament he has left us, not so much to contemplate but more to activate, to carry into the world that is dying for a taste of his life through us. Amen.

God Knows the Heart

Sheespcott Community Church August 30, 2009

Deuteronomy 4: 1-2, 6-9

Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23

God Knows the Heart

God knows the heart. That fact can provide us the greatest comfort in a world where we often feel misunderstood; or, it can be the scariest thing we can think of, knowing ourselves as we do, and what is in our hearts.

What is in our hearts? That is the deeper question in today’s gospel and what I want to spend time on with you this morning because we are community together, and what is in our hearts will determine exactly the kind of community that we are and will be. It may be that by the end of this message, we will all want to think carefully about how we are who we are before God, and if the message does prove scary, rather than comforting, perhaps we can make amends where necessary to be the people God is calling as his own.

Our friend and Redeemer Jesus is having yet another toe-to-toe with the Scribes and Pharisees in today’s gospel. This time it’s about the disciples’ neglect to wash their hands before they ate. They inquire of Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with “unclean” hands?”

Before I quote Jesus in his exasperation, let me give you a bit of background about the ritual of hand washing. We ourselves know our mothers’ mantra before we could sit down at the table to eat––either, “Did you wash your hands?” or, in households like the one where I grew up, where there was less concern for the child’s psychological development, the simple declarative, “Go wash your hands,” that without inspection of the presumably offending hands. That admonition to wash had everything to do with cleanliness and the elimination of germs, which were only discovered in the nineteenth century. Let’s hear it for Louis Pasteur, who was ridiculed from every corner but persevered in his theory, and we all benefit from his brave science and scientific approach. Thank you, Louis.

In Jesus’s time the Scribes and Pharisees were not concerned with the cleanliness of the hands in regard to those as yet undiscovered germs, but rather, it was a ceremonial cleanness that was at stake. Let me briefly describe the hand washing ceremony of observant Jews of the period. The hands had to be free of any coating of sand, mortar, gravel or any such substance. The water for washing the hands had to be kept in special stone jars, so that the water in itself was clean for ceremonial purposes. Nothing can have fallen into it or been mixed with it.

In the first step of the washing, the hands were held with fingers pointing upwards, and water was poured over them and had to run at least down to the wrists. The minimum amount of water was a so-called “log,” which was an eggshell and a half of water. While the hands were still wet, each hand was washed with the fist of the other. Now the water was unclean because it had been used to wash unclean hands. It was discarded and the next step in the hand washing began. The hands were held with fingers pointing downwards, and water was poured over them in a rinsing action that began at the wrists and ran down over the fingers. Only then were the hands considered clean.

Note that the Scribes and Pharisees commented on the tradition of the elders. Significantly, these are not the elders of the synagogue of the day, as we have de facto elders in our church, but they were the ancient legal experts of the old days. What was the tradition of those elders and in essence the Jewish law? For the Jew, the Law meant two things: preeminently the Ten Commandments, and of those, preeminently the first two: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with your whole understanding, and your neighbor as yourself for the love of God. Secondarily, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, called the Pentateuch. While there were some rules and regulations in the Pentateuch, mostly it was the statement of great moral principles, which a person was to interpret in and for his or her life. It was an oral tradition.

But in the fourth and fifth centuries before Christ, a whole new class of legal experts came into being, who were known as the Scribes. They were all about the classification of these moral principles into thousands and thousands of rules and regulations governing every aspect of a person’s life. Depending on the everyday Jew’s observation of these rules and regs, he or she was worthy or not worthy in the sight of God. In the case of the disciples’ unwashed hands, these followers of Jesus, who, to the scandal of the Scribes and Pharisees, was not demanding that his followers observe the Law and wash their hands in the ritual manner, these followers of Jesus were not dirty in the hygienic sense but in the sense of being unclean in the sight of God.

To shed light on how important this washing rule was to those Scribes and Pharisees, there was a story of a Rabbi who once omitted the washing ceremony and was buried not with the traditional ritual, but in excommunication for the violation of that one rule. That to the Scribal and Pharisaic Jew was religion. It was ritual, ceremonial, with regulations like the washing rule, which they considered to be the essence of the service of God. That is what Jesus was up against whenever he encountered these men of the Law. In a real sense, Jesus and they spoke different languages. There was a fundamental division: religion as ritual, ceremony, rules and regulations, and religion as loving God and loving other human beings.

On the particular day in the particular encounter recorded in today’s gospel, it is clear which side Jesus came down on. True cleanliness arises from the purity of one’s interior inspiration and not from soap and water. He is reported to have quoted the prophet Isaiah to them, when he said, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “’These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’” You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.

Jesus was not cowed by the learning or position of these greatly revered men in the Jewish community, and when addressing them, he did not mince words. He called them hypocrites. Let’s look at the word a little more closely. Hypocrite. It comes from the Greek hypocrites, meaning simply, one who answers. It goes on to mean one who answers in a set dialogue or a set conversation, that is to say, an actor. Finally, it means one who is not simply an actor on a stage, but one whose whole life is a piece of acting without any sincerity behind it at all. We can understand that anyone who believes religion is a legal thing, and that religion means carrying out rules and regulations, observing certain rituals and keeping certain taboos, a person like that is by definition a hypocrite.

Which reminds me of an experience I had back in the ‘70s, an interview, a conversation with a woman who was purportedly interested in bringing together the different elements of Christianity in our town in order to be a sign of unity rather than division among Christian denominations. That sounded like a good idea to me, at that time when I was a practicing Roman Catholic. She and I were talking tentatively, and she raised some issues about Catholicism that she disagreed with, and she was off and running, unstoppable. It was as though a curtain or veil dropped and communication stopped.

When she was speaking out of her own idea about Catholicism as contrasted with her religious expression, she guaranteed that I and others like me were on the road to hell and I had better do something about it while I could, which was to say, join her church, which had the truth. I understand this as hypocrisy in the way Jesus was using the word. A set dialogue or set conversation with knee-jerk assertions and responses, based on legalism. It’s kind of ironic, really, because if there’s one church in the whole panorama of Christian churches that is identified with legalisms, it’s the Roman Catholic Church. We concluded our interview that day with my telling her that I would rather go to hell with the Catholics up on the hill than be in heaven with her. That was a long time ago, but I did remember that when I read about the meaning of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy that springs out of legalism takes account of a person’s outward actions, but it takes no account at all of inward feelings and thoughts, which is where the good or evil begins. The person may well be meticulously serving God in outward things, and bluntly disobeying God in inward things, and that is hypocrisy. While it is good to make religious observance as in scripture reading, worshipping together as a church, praying, all of these observances are subordinated to the fundamental question I began with: What is in our hearts? As Jesus told his listeners, “Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ’unclean.’”

Of everything Jesus said that day, that was probably the most radical and troubling, as far as the Scribes and Pharisees were concerned. Why? Because what he was declaring that day would have included and perhaps especially meant kinds of food that an orthodox Jew would never ever eat. Remember Peter refusing the order he heard when he saw the vision of a large canvas dropped down from heaven, which contained many animals that he as an observant Jew would not eat? The voice accompanying the vision told him to get up, kill and eat. Won’t happen, was his first response, and then he saw the vision twice more. He eventually understood that the animals he had been calling unclean and refusing to eat represented the Gentiles, to whom, through Cornelius the centurion, he began to minister to the very next day. It’s a great story. If you want to read it, it’s Acts 10: 1-48.

After making his startling statement about nothing that came into a man from the outside was unclean, Jesus went on to say that if in our hearts there are evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly, these evils that come from inside, these are what make a person unclean. In effect he was saying that things cannot be clean or unclean in any religious sense of the term. Only persons can be defiled , and what defiles a person is the actions of that person, which are the product of his or her heart. This was new and has to have raised fury to a fever pitch with the Scribes and Pharisees. Jesus was certainly consistent in how he dealt with them .

You know how when you watch a horror movie, and the ingenue is heading up a creaking staircase in the dark with a flickering nub of a candle, and you the viewer know there is something perfectly horrible behind the door because you’ve been prepared for it in a way the ingenue has not, you might call out involuntarily, “DON’T GO IN THERE!” Well, sometimes I feel like that about Jesus, even though I know how the story ends. Like Peter, whom Jesus sharply rebuked with a “Get thee behind me, Satan,” when Peter said, “God forbid that these awful things should happen to you,” after Jesus prophesied his end in Jerusalem. When Jesus does get into it with the Scribes and Pharisees, it’s one of those, here-we-go-again situations. He sure knew how to get them going, but that wasn’t his purpose, clearly. That was simply collateral damage in the popularity department, and Jesus never was concerned about that. What he was concerned about was the truth that he, the Way, the Word of God, the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Life, had come to show and tell.

Before I conclude I’d like to elaborate a bit on what Jesus enumerated as the unclean things that come out a man. He no doubt used the word “man,” but I think it’s worth noting that women are full-service sinners as well and fully capable of all of what Jesus enumerates. Most of these unclean things are self-explanatory, but I’d like to elaborate on two which stand out. The first in the list––evil thoughts. These are evil designs. Every outward act of sin is preceded by an act of choice––evil thought or design out of which an evil action comes. What do we think about on our beds at night?

Next, the one we are probably most familiar with: arrogance or pride, which sets itself up against God, puts a person on a par with God. Think of the poet John Milton’s figure of Satan in his epic Paradise Lost who is the classic expression of this type of overweening pride. “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven,” he famously declared in the poem. To serve Jesus, the one who in the form of a man, sat at the right hand of God, Satan’s coveted place. This brightest of the archangels, wherefore the name Lucifer, meaning Lightbearer, refused to bend the knee in worship before a son of man, and as the story goes, he was instantly cast out of heaven to reign in hell for eternity.

In our less dramatic lives, we have the same choice or opportunity to bend, to worship, to surrender––or not––to cultivate the religion of the heart. God knows our hearts. Let us think about allowing God his way that those hearts may be of flesh and not of stone, unfeelingly bound in a straitjacket of legalism constructed by ourselves or others. Amen.

Certainty in Uncertainty

Sheepscott Community Church August 23, 2009

1 Kings 8: 1, 6, 22-30, 41-43

Ephesians 6: 10-20

John 6: 56-69

Certainty in Uncertainty: Holding the Vision

You’ve probably heard this joke before, but bear with me. I’m going to stretch it to cover a point I want to make this morning.

A guy is riding on a train, and as he rides along he is tearing up a paper he has in his lap and throwing the bits out the train window. His compartment mate is looking at him askance, wondering whether he should go down to the club car, the sooner the better, but not before he has to ask, “Why are you doing that?” The reply? “To keep away the elephants.” 

“But there aren’t any elephants,” the man said. “ You see,” the tearer of paper replied, “it’s working!”

We have our little rituals, charms, and habits––whether we’re conscious of them or not––that we think enable us to get through the day. What I suggest to you today is that there is no need to depend on charms of any kind, that it is possible to be able to not just get through the day but to be able to rejoice in the day without knowing what the day holds, what the rest of your life holds; to rejoice in the day without tearing up pieces of paper or anything else to keep at bay whatever it is that we ponder with fear in the night. You know this is finally going to be Jesus, don’t you? No big secret, but let’s see how we get there today.

Two weeks ago when I gave a message about putting the car in reverse when we find ourselves on a wrong road, and not continuing on just because we want to see something through or to save face, when I gave that message, Bill Weary had an interesting counter to that message that I want to touch on this morning. He noted that there are also roads to the unknown that we start down that we would do well to continue on, to perhaps discover our destiny, or something we had not known before, which we will not discover otherwise.

And I want to go in that direction, down the unknown road, this morning. But before we do, I would talk about discernment, which is one of the gifts of the Spirit. Discernment enables us to distinguish, to discern what is of God and what is not of God. It is an element of the gift of wisdom. It is essential when we are making life decisions that we prayerfully, thoughtfully, carefully discern a plan of action, a way or direction forward.

As an example of what happens when we do not exercise prayerful discernment, think of Jim Jones and his followers in the equatorial jungles of Guiana in South America back in 1978. 909 people died when they drank the Kool-Aid, a saying that sadly entered the language at the time, and which indicated the absence of thoughtful discernment, the pitching headlong down the wrong road, following a charismatic leader in a lemming-like way. A twentieth-century Pied Piper of Hamlin, only this was no fairy tale; it was tragically real.

If Jim Jones’s followers had discerned before they left California that the situation was something that had to be closely looked at, if they had talked among themselves and ideally with others outside of that closed group, the outcome might have been very different. Did anyone have misgivings?

The point at which we stop our car and back it up, so to speak, is when Jones’ followers might have decided not to board the plane for South America. It is the same point that the disciples of Jesus have reached in this morning’s gospel. It really is a watershed moment. If you recall from last week’s gospel, Jesus has just announced and repeats in this morning’s gospel, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.” A hard saying, difficult to take in, repulsive even. And indeed his disciples said, one to another, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

Jesus knew they were grumbling, and said to them, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” Nothing he said convinced some of them, and so from that point many of the disciples turned back and did not follow him anymore. They did put the car in reverse and back up off this road they had been tentatively following down, having trusted in what they had seen and heard: the healings, the water into wine, the multiplied fish and loaves of bread, the wonderful down-home teachings. But now, this new word. It was more than they could take. It was an insult to their intelligence and their sensibilities. As Jesus asked them, “Does this word offend you?” And of course it did. Mightily. They were refusing to understand something in a new way and to accept what they could not understand. 

Note that there were many disciples beyond the Twelve, who were later called the apostles. By definition, a disciple is one who attends upon another for the purpose of learning from him; a pupil or a scholar, and in this context, Christ is the teacher, all of his followers, the disciples. Apostle by contrast is one sent, a messenger, applied preeminently to Christ as the one sent of God, and after that to his twelve selected followers, who were witnesses, they themselves in turn sent as messengers of the new Way taught by Jesus.

Jesus asked the Twelve if they too would leave, and Peter spoke for all of them when he said, “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” And so he was, which was the biggest contrast with a tyrant like Jim Jones, whose interest was in controlling people, exercising power over, something Jesus never did. Jesus never coerced; he always invited and lived the life he talked about. Leading by example.

It was yes, the belief, but especially the knowledge that could provide the wherewithal of vision necessary to keep the whole group of them going forward, following Jesus down an unknown road. We believe and know. Each of those men in his heart––and the women followers who were also with them but are not mentioned in this passage––each of those in his or her heart had to make the decision whether to continue to take a chance on this charismatic leader––and he didn’t make it any easier by talking this way, did he? What must others think about us as his followers? They were no less conscious of others’ opinions than we are now. 

The Twelve did stay with him. As Peter said, “To whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.” Understand that that decision was more difficult for them in a way than it might be for us because there was no history, no religion, no tradition had yet built up around Jesus. He was the nominal head of Jewish sect, seen as a troublemaker by Jewish leaders. If it was more difficult in that sense for the early followers, it was also perhaps easier in another way. Here they had the living man to listen to, to look at, to watch in his amazing feats, to learn from. While some were wondering out loud if he was the expected Messiah who would free them from Rome’s rule, he was only one. There were others who were being evaluated in that same light. When people are anxious for deliverance, whether from economic woes, religious persecution, the threats of and oppression of war, messiahs of many stripes will rise up and be acclaimed in the various areas of human striving, suffering, fears and success. Jesus was one, a special One, granted, but only one of many.

But are history and tradition enough to make us choose to go down the road after this Christ, who may be the answer we have been looking for to counteract those night fears, to help us make meaning of a life that has lost its meaning because of no defining employment; because of a relationship lost; because of a sapping illness, whether physical or mental; because of a tangle of hostility in our family that makes the day-to-day existence a trial if not downright unbearable? Can this Christ be the answer? Is this the road?

Well, I have my answers of the moment, and it is by those I live from day to day. But those are not your answers. You yourself have to ponder these words of Jesus, as the disciples did; some remained, some left.  Do we even want to be that close to someone, that when we take in that one––even if it is words of spirit, as Jesus said––do we want to seem to surrender our autonomy by such a personal invasion of our space, or what we consider our space?

I think each of us can ask for an experience of Jesus that can provide life-giving vision over a lifetime, that will give us a focus, a reminder when we begin to forget why we are doing this worship thing, why we come to church at all. Is it just tearing up those pieces of paper and tossing them out the window, just in case, just in case. Are we simply hedging our bets by coming here, by trying to live a good life? I think we deserve to ask ourselves this question before God and can also ask for an answer, a more defined assurance that it is not all for nothing. I can almost guarantee you’re not going to have the St. Paul experience of being knocked off your horse, although that’s possible. However, I can guarantee without qualification that right now in this moment, you are intimately, completely known and loved by the God of the universe, who we call by any number of names, and who has been called even more names through the ages, as in Isaiah 9: Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace. We as a worshipping church have come to know him through the immediacy of Jesus. And how do we know Jesus, except by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of the living God who moves among us. 

Incidentally some have wondered why we use the word “Spirit” now rather than “Ghost,” as it was formerly––the Holy Ghost. As I understand it, that change was instituted across the denominations about 25 years ago, simply because of the freight that the word ghost had come to carry, not the least part of which was that it frightened small children. No need to introduce that kind of fear around God; there’s plenty of other fear without that as well.

Anyway, we are still milling around on the road to nowhere, trying to decide, as some of the disciples did, whether to follow Jesus down that road, or, as some other disciples did, to turn back. I am encouraging you, if you do not have conviction enough to go forward, wherever you might be in your faith walk, to ask the Spirit of God to give you that level of conviction, so you’re not just spinning your wheels, but actually progressing in your life with God, your spiritual life. This vision will be attuned to you; only you will recognize the earmarks because it is customized for you. The caveat is that you have to care enough to be looking and listening for the Lord, who will reveal himself, in the scripture, through another person or circumstance, in worship, at the communion, in a random moment when you are walking along the street, thinking about something else. 

The key is to keep your heart right, as best you can. When the judgment against another comes in, when you slip into self-pity, when the grudge mode surfaces again, send those things packing. You, we can do that in and with our free wills all the time. That business is totally ours to do. When we do choose to keep our hearts right before God, we make a way for the revelation or refinement or extension of our personal vision, a vision that can keep us on the road following Jesus.

I have thought when I have read Peter’s response, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” I have thought when I’ve read that that it sounds like Peter was shrugging his shoulders. What else were they going to do? Their fishing business was all but kaput. They had already tossed their nets on his side of the boat. It doesn’t sound like there was any joy in his response, only resignation in faith, although tinged perhaps with a bit of remembered awe.

We can ask for our own basis for awe so that we have something, which, while insubstantial because it is of the spirit, is yet substantial in that same sense, enough to carry us along, to carry us through. And then you have to walk in the light of that vision that has been given to you and not compare yourselves with others or judge them. Their vision is between them and God. You can never be the same after the unveiling of truth, and if that has not yet happened for you, seek it with all your heart and it will be given.

That watershed moment will mark you as going forward as a truer disciple––or not. While there is no certainty about the course ahead, there is certainty about the One we are following, and we continue in that following––again––in the light of the vision that has been given us. It is not to idolize the vision, but to check in from time to time to assure ourselves that yes, this is true, and that is true, and God has given me this gift to remember, and I can go forward, while much in the world clamors against my going forward. 

In relation to this idea, there was a phrase repeated twice in the first reading: “toward this place.” Solomon prayed to God, “May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day, this place of which you said, ‘My Name shall be there,’ so that you will hear the prayer that your servant prays toward this place. Hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place.”

The parallel I make here is not idolizing our personal vision that keeps us going, whatever form it takes or took, but that just as Solomon asks that God hear the prayer of the people as they pray towards the Temple, so we can turn in the direction of that interior vision which is in our inner Temple, where we commune with God, whenever we need a booster of our faith. That vision will in turn lead us back to prayer through Christ. 

So, while tearing up bits of paper might ensure that the elephants don’t come in one person’s cosmology, we can have infinitely greater assurance that trusting prayer in the leadership of Jesus, in the sense that Peter recognized it––”to whom else shall we go?”––we can trust that prayer in and to that one will guide us on all unknown roads, including that last road. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Amen.

Eat My Flesh?

Sheepscott Community Church August 16, 2009

1 Kings 2: 10-12; 3: 3-14

John 6: 51-58

Eat My Flesh?

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The reading from First Kings sets us up nicely for today’s message. The young Solomon, who has succeeded his father David as King of Israel, has a dream in which God tells him to ask for what he wants, and God will give it to him. Solomon points out that he is a mere child and does not know how to govern such a great people as these are. He asks God for a discerning heart, for wisdom to distinguish between right and wrong and thereby to govern this people effectively. Solomon recognized his own poverty, not in relation to the wealth of the world––he had plenty of that––but in relation to experience. Because he knew himself poor, God could work with that. Solomon knew that he needed the wits and wisdom of God in order to do his job.

We need that wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the generosity of imagination of Jesus to consider today’s gospel. This is that outrageous gospel wherein Jesus says to the disciples, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.” We’ll hear in next week’s gospel how disturbed many of Jesus’s followers were to hear him use such language. What he was saying was the basis of one of the hot-button issues in the late medieval church: transubstantiation. And for good reason it was a hot-button issue: it defined an idea that conjured cannibalism or vampirism in some minds.

The term transubstantiation means the change of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, a literal understanding of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper. “Take and eat; this is my body. Take and drink; this is my blood.” The term itself, which was not used until the eleventh century, was codified in its meaning at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and later at the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, called to counteract the Reformation. As a result of the Protestant Reformation, Many of the reformers and the reformed refused to accept this literal interpretation of the words of Jesus and rather saw them as figurative. They also compared the words of Jesus with other quotations in scripture that broadened understanding away from that literalness. However, even the general Protestant view does not regard the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper as common bread and wine, but respects them as symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

When I was doing background reading for this sermon, I was struck by the thought, What difference does it make whether we view the Communion as this or as that? How important is it that one belief prevail over another?Just as each of us has our own ideas about God, depending on our backgrounds, including religious upbringing––or not––cultural mores, and world view, so each one of us acts out of a given understanding of communion, that may have been learned through instruction, experience or by osmosis. We may call it Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, or the sacramental meal. Might not God, who is myriad and yet One, might not God be glorified in these myriad expressions of belief that are finally one under the headship of the chosen One, Jesus? Indeed in whose name we share the communion, whether commemoratively or transubstantively at all?

The endless discussions, arguments and writings on the question of communion raised by Jesus’s language in today’s gospel and at the Last Supper, are all valuable because they provide an opportunity for the clarification of our own personal thought and belief. To clarify thought around this extraordinary idea of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ, I’m going to employ the wisdom of a good doctor, the poet William Carlos Williams. In last week’s sermon, I discussed faith healing and the reluctance of some who depend on that to admit the opinions and practice of medical doctors. As I stated then, all healing in all its forms, from all its sources, finally comes from God. 

Also in the sermon, I asked that we be willing to face suffering, alleviating it where and when we can, and recognizing that we cannot always alleviate it. Recall King David weeping on the floor in the room above the gate of the city, when his insurrectionist son Absalom was killed. Remember too the image of Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms, the Pieta of Michelangelo. Too late for David and Absalom, too late for Mary and Jesus. All those grieving parents could do was to face and be in and hold the suffering.

This is where William Carlos Williams comes in, where he can be viewed as a kind of bridging figure, providing focus on one hand for the communion and what constitutes it, and on the other hand, about suffering and how to view it. Dr. Williams, who won a Pulitzer for his poetry collection Paterson, was a general practitioner and pediatrician in New Jersey for many years. When asked how he could be both writer and doctor, both of which are all-consuming professions, he answered that as a writer he had never felt that medicine interfered with him, but rather, it was his very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for him to write. Interesting use of food and drink in that context of healing and artistic expression. Communion maybe?

Before I go on, I should note for those younger members of the congregation that in Dr. Williams’ days of practice, through the late ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, doctors made house calls. Many of us remember our doctors, knocking at the door with their black bags with the dreaded hypodermic needle inside. 

In Williams’s own words, “It’s the humdrum, day-in, day-out everyday work that is the real satisfaction of the practice of medicine; the patients a man has seen on his daily visits over a forty-year period of weekdays and Sundays that make up his life. I have never had a money practice,” and here I would guess that he means he had never been a specialist, which is pretty much where all the money in medicine lies, “it would have been impossible for me,” he said. 

“But the actual calling on people, at all times and under all conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives, when they were being born, when they were dying, watching them die, watching them get well when they were ill, has always absorbed me.” It sounds like Dr. Williams partook of the same wisdom of God that Solomon shared, except his was bent in the direction of healing and poetry, while Solomon’s, by his request, was bent in the direction of governing.

Just a few more sentences of Williams himself. In speaking again of his patients, he wrote, “I lost myself in the very properties of their minds: for the moment at least I actually became them, whoever they should be, so that when I detached myself from them at the end of a half hour of intense concentration over some illness which was affecting them, it was as though I was reawakening from a sleep. For the moment I myself did not exist; nothing of myself affected me. As a consequence I came back to myself, as from any other sleep, rested.”

That sounds so much like communion to me because it sounds like the hands-on application of the theology of the Body of Christ. When we forget ourselves and are fully with another, we are communion for one another. We become, we are the flesh and blood of the Body of Christ. 

On Wednesday night at the community supper at Second Congregational Church, where Sheepscott Community Church serves on the second Wednesday of the month with membrs of South Bristol Congregational, Clara Fagan dropped a line that opened up my own understanding of this sermon I was working on, and I share that line with you. By the way, the choir sang for the first time at the supper, for their supper, under Carroll’s direction on Wednesday. Anyway, Clara, speaking of one of the pieces of the choir’s music, said she had left [the music for] “All the Riches of His Grace” in church. I thought, No! No! Here you are. Here you all are, the riches of his grace, out through the church doors and in the street, so to speak. You have become the flesh and blood of Christ, fed to the folks at the supper at Second Congregational in service and in song, as surely as the chicken legs, hot dogs and sald are fed out.. Are you transubstantiated, as it were? Changed into the flesh and blood of Christ, to be fed to others? That’s one way to think about it.

Another story along that line is one I overheard Lily Mayer telling someone following the service last week. It concerned Vernon, a physically challenged older man who walks daily along Route 130 in the Damariscotta-Bristol Mills area. He doesn’t hitchhike, but folks, like Lily, often stop to give him a ride. When we talked about this at the supper the other night, Peter, one of the patrons of the supper, said that he too had picked up Vernon and given him a ride more than once. This is the practice of community, knowing who is out there and what the needs are, and responding to those needs, and the only way we can know that is by being out there.

Anyway, back to Lily. She engaged Vernon in conversation, and found out that he has two bad knees, and the walking is getting more and more difficult. I’ve heard Lily say before how she experiences the Body of Christ: it is in one another. Surely she was that to her companion in travel that day, as Peter has been as well. And Vernon was the same for them. How different is that from Doctor Williams, so completely absorbed in his patients that he entirely forgot himself. Another quotation of his that seems applicable here in relation to Lily and Peter and their passenger: “Let the successful carry off their blue ribbons; I have known the unsuccessful, far better persons than their lucky brothers.” Our poverty before God comes in different forms.

Like Elijah waiting to see God in the cleft of the rock where God has placed him, we do not experience God usually in the all-consuming fire, in the great wind that crushes the rocks, but in the still small whispering voice. There is God. As Williams has it, and as I would suggest Lily does as well, “We catch a glimpse of something from time to time, which shows us that a presence has just brushed past us, some rare thing––just when the smiling little Italian woman––or Vernon with his bad knees––has left us. For a moment we are dazzled. What was that? We can’t name it,” says Williams. Never one to shirk a challenge, I would counter that we can name it: it is the presence of Christ in the world, his very flesh and blood in us, as we are with one another. 

Psalm 27 includes the lines, “Come,” says my heart. “Seek God’s face.” In fact, show me your face has been the cry of mystics to God through the ages. Look at one another. There is the face of God. There is communion, the body and blood of Christ in its fullest and realest sense. 

It seems so simple, and yet synods and conferences and councils through the ages have constructed dialectics, which are arbitrary systems, which since all systems are mere inventions, is necessarily in each case a false premise, upon which a closed system is built, shutting those who confine themselves to it away from the rest of the world. All people in one way or another use a dialectic of some sort into which they are shut. It can be any country, any group of people. So each group is limited or maimed even by this shutting up and off from others. Each group is enclosed in its own dialectic cloud and for that reason, we wage wars and have pride over the most superficial things and ideas. 

Even as I say that, I recoup what I said earlier about the value of arguing and positing positions on all matters, including and perhaps especially theological matters. There’s value in delineating our beliefs, even if it’s just for ourselves. It’s fun and important for the clarification of thought. However, when those arguments result in entrenchment and division of people, one from another, then it is necessary to return to the source, who is One, to be replenished and further enlightened. We do that with one another in worship and especially in the communion, and we do it in our private prayer where God listens and responds and restores. Let us seek the renewal of our own minds, to unstick ourselves from the ruts of our thinking. Let us become new.

This morning, following the service, Maia Alexandra Clancy, this precious little baby will become new––a newly baptized member of the Body of Christ. We would do well, as we thank God for this little one in our midst, we would do well to ask God to renew us, even as we pray for Maia and for her family. What an opportunity we have to celebrate together another sacrament, that of baptism.