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Giving in Five Directions

Published on October 12, 2015November 2, 2015 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, October 11, 2015 || Proper 23B || Mark 10:17-31

Jesus feels drawn to the man kneeling in front of him. His heart is warmed, and he feels the stirrings of love and compassion for this frightened soul in the midst of an existential crisis. Perhaps the man recently had a parent or friend die, or perhaps he himself had experienced an accident or illness that brought death near. Whatever the trigger, the man comes to Jesus with a serious question that has obviously been plaguing him because of some unspoken dread roiling within him.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he asks. Jesus lists off some of the standard commandments, and the man checks each box. That’s when Jesus looks at him with love and compassion. Here is this man in fine clothes getting dirty in the dust of the road. Here is this man with obvious wealth and power coming to an itinerant preacher with no place to lay his head. “I know what’s holding you back,” Jesus says. “It’s always something. There’s always something in the way that only you can shift. I can help. I can encourage. I can give you strength and courage. But you must decide.”

“What? What is it?” pleads the man.

“In your case: sell all you have and give the money to the poor. Then come, follow me.”

Shocked into speechlessness, the man gives Jesus a hard look, stands, dusts off his finery, and stalks away, not really understanding the source of his tears. Jesus invited this man to give away his possessions. He was holding his stuff so tightly that he couldn’t open his hands to receive what Jesus was offering him. He couldn’t let go, so he never discovered how life-changing it can be to release your grip, to uncurl your hand ready to give and ready to receive.

Jesus diagnoses this man on the spot. Jesus loves him enough not to sugarcoat what he needs to do to get past the barriers his own wealth has set up. Give it all away. Just give it all away. This action of giving is one of the more powerful steps we can take in our lives of faith in response to God’s movement in those lives. So it makes sense that Jesus invites each and every one of us, like the man in the story, to give. And as near as I can tell, this giving follows a general pattern.

First we have giving up. I know, I know, the great American sports movie teaches us differently: every single one of them follows the same pattern: upstart team or individual gets trounced by dominant team or individual. Upstart trains, learns something about teamwork or grit, and challenges the champion. The game goes horribly for our heroes until the last minute – it’s gut check time – and they decide never to give up. With renewed strength and faith, the upstart wins in the last second. That’s the narrative we are steeped in here in the United States. Never give up.

And yet, that’s exactly what our faith calls us to do. Give up. So we ask ourselves: what does God desire us to give up? Most questions we put to God are hard. But not this one. God dreams for us to have as close a connection to God as God has to us. Therefore, we have to give up all that stands in the way of such intimate connection. There’s a special word for this stuff that stands in the way: “idol.” Whatever it is, each of us has something we tend to put ahead of God. We look to that something to give us life. But since the idol will never be able to give us what we need, our lives shrivel until they are brittle and paper thin, starved because the idol provides such poor nourishment.

So God urges us to give up such idols. But that’s just step one. Step two is giving in. It’s not enough to do away with the idols. If we don’t give in – if we don’t surrender ourselves into God’s loving and sustaining care – then the power vacuum will just attract another idol to take the place of the old one. So we give in to God. We surrender ourselves to God’s love and mercy.

This giving in is so hard. It continues going against the grain we’ve been taught. Now the war movie takes center stage. Of course, we’d never surrender! But again, we must ask ourselves: to whom are we surrendering. Not to the enemy. Not to the bad guy. We surrender to our own commander. We were in rebellion all along, and now we’re coming home.

So we give up, then we give in. And then we give ourselves over to trusting God with our whole beings. It’s not enough simply to surrender. Giving over means joining God’s side. You say, “You’re in charge, Lord, not me. Of the two of us, I’m not the better decision maker, so why don’t you take the lead. I’ll follow.”

Again, giving over is no cakewalk. Our socialization is still against us. We’ve seen too many movies, and now the Teacher-Pupil archetype comes to mind – the one where the hard luck case puts trust in a mentor who turns out not to be as perfect as the hard luck case thought, and drama ensues. We are the hard luck cases, but our mentor just so happens to be as perfect as we think. (More perfect even, since we can’t begin to perceive the wonder of God.)

So we give up, then we give in, then we give over. Now we’re ready to give back. We remember the TV shows and movies in which the teenager gets a first credit card and goes on a crazy buying spree. Yep, that’s us, if given half a chance, so maybe we shouldn’t be in charge. Since we trust God more than we trust ourselves, we conclude, it’s time for God to take charge of all our stuff. We can be stewards of the stuff, but it’s not ours anymore.

Each year, God gives us stewardship of most of this stuff and keeps a small percentage to be used for God’s mission here at St. Mark’s and elsewhere. We partner with God by pledging this small percentage towards God’s mission. That percentage might be 10% or a little less or a little more. Through prayer, we can discern what’s right for each of us in our circumstances.

This giving back transitions into the final act of giving: giving forward; that is, not only financing God’s mission but participating in it with our own gifts and passions. Think of disaster films in which everyone bands together to beat the odds. Giving forward means making decisions and making sacrifices with people other than ourselves in mind. Giving forward means propelling into God’s bright future those people who think they have no future.

Just as Jesus invites the man in today’s Gospel to give away all he has, Jesus invites us to give. With God’s help, we give up our idols. We give in to God and surrender our malfunctioning wills. We give over to God our self-determination and trust God’s guidance. We give back to God all that we have, knowing that our stuff is safer in God’s hands. And we give forward for God, partnering with God in the great mission of healing and reconciliation in this world. To give up, in, over, back, forward – to give – is a great act of faith. Thanks be to God, then, that God began this entire process by giving first: giving us God’s son, God’s grace, love, hope; giving us our own deep desire to give.

Never Alone

Published on October 5, 2015April 28, 2017 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, October 4, 2015 || Proper 22B || Mark 10:2-16

“Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.” By the end of this year, I will have said these words eleven times after hearing the marriage vows of eleven couples. Jesus says these words in today’s Gospel lesson. And he says many other words about marriage and divorce, about fidelity and desire, and about relationships with the most vulnerable. Beneath these words, no matter how hard they are to hear or to speak, beneath these words shimmers Jesus’ surpassing dream for all creation – that none of us and no part of that creation will ever truly be alone.

Let’s start at the beginning and see what we shall see. The Pharisees come to test Jesus. Whenever this happens in the Gospel, we can bet that Jesus is not going to fall into the Pharisees trap, for a trap it is. They are not being genuine. They are not actually curious about what this great teacher has to say about a certain hot button issue. They just want to make Jesus look bad. This is not the way to begin a conversation of such consequence, and yet testing Jesus is their motive. Thus, we have our first notion of aloneness – the Pharisees desire to set Jesus apart, on the wrong side of an issue, in order to ridicule and debase him, to say to his followers, “See, your teacher is callous and wrong. How could you listen to him?”

You can see how the test is rigged to put Jesus on the wrong side. They lay their trap with this question: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” The answer to this question in the Jewish society of the time was simple: “Yes, it is lawful,” as described in the Law and codified in the book of Deuteronomy. But the Pharisees suspect that Jesus might have something else to say, something they could use against him.

Of course, Jesus doesn’t fall for the trap. Instead, he turns the question back on them, in effect drawing them closer to him, into a conversation instead of a courtroom proceeding. “What did Moses command you?” The Pharisees reply, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” Notice there are two separate actions in this process: writing the certificate of dismissal and completing the divorce. The reality of this two-step process spurs Jesus’ next statement: “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.”

You see, Moses created the “certificate of dismissal” in order to protect the divorced wife. Men held all the power in the relationship. Women went from being under their father’s power to being under their husband’s. They had no freedom of choice. They were closer to property than people. There was no such thing as mutuality in the relationship. According to some schools of rabbinical thought, a man could divorce his wife for burning his dinner.

In today’s society, some divorced women feel a sense of liberation when they finally tunnel out of the pit their husbands’ misplaced power had dug for them. These women are models of resiliency and courage. But in Jesus’ culture, a woman simply couldn’t leave her husband. If he divorced her, she might feel some small sense of liberation, but this would most likely be snuffed out by fear: fear that she had no protection, no connections; fear that she was now a ripe target for exploitation.

That’s why Moses created the “certificate of dismissal.” It was something a divorced woman could carry with her to show potential employers or future spouses that the divorce was her husband’s idea and everything had been done according to the Law. The “hardness of heart” Jesus speaks of comes from husbands who kicked their wives out of the house with absolutely no thought to their future welfare. So the certificate of dismissal was an oh-so-small gesture to keep the divorced woman from feeling completely abandoned, completely alone.

But Jesus isn’t willing to let the conversation go with an oh-so-small gesture. Instead, Jesus reaches back, past Moses and the Law, all the back to the creation narratives of the book of Genesis. In the first creation story, humanity is made after everything else, so there was no chance for loneliness. But in the second creation story, which Jesus’ references, the “person of earth” (ha adam in the Hebrew) is created first, so this person is utterly and hopelessly alone. So God makes every animal to see if it would alleviate the human’s loneliness, but to no avail. And so God makes another person. And finally the human being finds deep connection, deep relationship. Of course, this is before the fall, before domination and isolation had entered into the story.

Jesus dreams for all creation to embrace living lives of deep connection, so no one need be alone. That’s why he spends so much time with people whom others completely ignore. So the question is, does this mean Jesus prohibits divorce, in all cases, for all time?

I don’t think so. Because domination and isolation are the sad realities of our fallen state, they often become the sad realities in our relationships. Sometimes dominance is the hallmark of a marital relationship, and so one person’s desire guts the relationship of its presumed mutuality. Sometimes the debasing feeling of aloneness is most acute when a marital relationship is supposed to be warding it away and isn’t. In these toxic cases, separation often leads to new life, new possibilities, new chances for mutual connection with other people. Sometimes divorce is the merciful choice, because mercy is all about second chances.

Jesus knows a thing or two about mercy. And so, like he often does, by appealing to a deeper reality, Jesus reorients the conversation to what really matters: not the Pharisees’ insincere test, but the sacredness of relationships that chase isolation away. Jesus ignores the Law, which the Pharisees bring up, and sidesteps the legal ramifications, so I don’t think his energy is invested in legislating new territory for his society’s divorce debate. The last two scenes in the passage show where his energy really sparks.

First, he clarifies something for the disciples. If someone initiates a divorce specifically to marry someone else, then that person has already committed adultery. In other words, the adulterer has satisfied his own craving without thought to the welfare of his spouse.* That person is now alone, and all because the adulterer couldn’t keep himself from straying. This lack of fidelity, this wanton disregard for the welfare of another really gets Jesus’ blood boiling. Again and again throughout the Gospel, his underlying dream surfaces: no one need ever be alone.

And so the final scene in our passage makes perfect sense with the others. We mentioned children two weeks ago: how they were the lowest of the low in Jesus’ society; lower than farm animals, they weren’t even thought of as people until they were old enough and strong enough to work. And yet, Jesus welcomes them into his arms, lets them cling to him, offers them the kingdom of God. In effect, he says, “You are not alone. You may be treated as if you don’t matter, as if you don’t exist, but don’t you believe it for a moment.”

He says the same thing to each of us. This is the conviction he breathes into our souls. In a world where domination and isolation reign, his good news reports a different story, one of connection and deep relationship. Too often, people fall victim to such domination and isolation, which infect the marital relationships that are designed to ward off such evils. In these cases, Jesus’ promise still holds: “You are not alone. I am with you. You need not seek fulfillment where none is to be found. Come to me and together we will begin your story again, so you may find new sources of connection and deep relationship. Remember: you need never be alone.”

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*I adlibbed a bit here on Sunday to make sure people understood how I interpret this bit: basically, I think the “and” between “divorces” and “marries” assumes that the two are linked (i.e. the person driving the divorce is doing it in order to marry another). I don’t think he’s talking about a divorce and then a remarriage ten years later.

The Box Garden

Published on September 28, 2015October 19, 2015 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

The ministry intern at St. Mark’s preached yesterday, so I have no sermon to offer to the Internet this morning. Instead, I held on to the following for just such an occasion, and I am glad to share it today. In August, I attended a training event called Living in the Green up in Hartford. It was a lovely training, which paired personal storytelling and deep sharing of convictions, values, hopes, and dreams with some nuts-and-bolts activities designed to move abstract conviction into concrete action. We had some time to journal following a session on the second day, during which I had been caught by the phrase “to pay attention.” That phrase was the genesis of the following poem which I wrote over the course of the hour or so following the session. I shared it with my colleagues at the training and now am happy to share it with you.

The Box Garden (August 20, 2015)

The tomato plants in the box garden
are fruiting right now.
When I walk up the back steps,
I see, peeking among the shoots,
a slippery red – here and there –
and my heart rejoices.
And before I pick the ripe ones,
before I even walk to the box,
I can taste the acidic sweetness
and feel the pulp roll around my tongue.

Each day, I anticipate seeing new ripeness,
and some days I am rewarded.
But not every day.
Some days the tomatoes are there,
but they are still green,
still growing, still emerging.
And from the back steps I can’t see them.
The next day a shock of red arrives,
and I know the tomato was there yesterday, too,
but it wasn’t ready yet.
The tomato was there, but camouflaged,
hidden until its taste blossoms
to meet the bite in my imagination.

Other days I have my head down,
and I trudge up the back steps
with the weight of too many lives
leadening my feet.
On those days, I don’t lift my eyes
to survey the box garden.
The dash of red dances on the periphery
of my vision, but I don’t acknowledge it.
Instead, I go inside and slump down.
And the next day,
the red remains, but its luster is gone.
It has rotted on the vine
like stored up manna.
And all because I was too caught up
to pay attention.

“Pay attention.”
It’s a curious phrase.
There is a transaction at stake,
A cost to be paid.
That cost is my “attention”;
my willingness to engage
Perceive
Embrace
Dwell
Awaken.
If I have paid this cost,
I wonder what I get in return.
A life lived in God, certainly.
But there is no quid pro quo here.
The presence of God abides always –
Awakens in me, awakens me.
And so the goods I receive
and the cost I paid
are one in the same.

My capacity to remain awake to God
is the first gift,
which allows the tasting of all others:
The acidic sweetness, yes,
And also the saltiness of tears,
the meaty savoriness of ragged love,
the bitterness of brokenness,
The broken bread, the cup poured out.
I pay attention when I lift these gifts to God,
or at least I try to.
I smell the flour
stuck to the round loaf
to keep it from sticking to the pan.
I smell the wine, too,
redolent of celebration.
I pay attention to each pair of hands
that receives the bread of heaven,
and I know that as I place it in those hands,
it is the Body of Christ.

But today is not Sunday,
And so I try to pay attention to other things:
The seagulls cartwheeling overhead,
the tangled man asleep
on a stone bench in the town square,
the box garden as I climb the back steps.
And for today, I know the reward
for my paying attention.
Today, it is one ripe tomato.

The Line After Recess

Published on September 21, 2015October 12, 2015 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, September 20, 2015 || Proper 20B || Mark 9:30-37

Every day of my fourth grade year, my class lined up at the end of recess to go back inside. The bell rang, and we raced to our spots in the line. But the race was in vain because no matter who arrived at the door first, we always lined up alphabetically by last name. By last name. What I wouldn’t have given to line up by first name. Then (Oh happy day!) I would have been at the very front of the line. No Aarons or Abigails in my class. No. Adam would have been the first name on the list. But those days were cruel. Every morning, I stood on tiptoes to see over the twenty-three heads in front of me, and only one boy – Shane Yellin – was worse off than I.

Then, on the day when all the mothers began insisting their fourth graders wear winter coats to school, something happened. Mrs. Ida Hughes, my math teacher, challenged us to line up in reverse alphabetical order. And for one cold, drizzly, glorious day, I stood at the front of the line and only one head obstructed my view of the playground doors.

Standing at the front of the line feels good and the benefits are numerous. Being in front means the concert tickets aren’t sold out. The first baseman hasn’t tired of signing autographs. The bucket of fried chicken at the church potluck retains its full complement of chicken legs. Certainly, perks abound for those in front. Go to any shopping center in the wee hours of the morning on the day after Thanksgiving and witness the millions of Americans attempting be first in line simply to purchase new TVs for “doorbuster” prices.

Of course, these benefits are all about me. I get the tickets and the autograph and the preferred piece of chicken. I get the deal on the television. I get all these things because I got in line before you. You are behind me and someone else is behind you and countless faceless others line up behind that someone else. So we stand in our line and stare at the backs of the heads in front of us. In this linear configuration, no one can converse. No one can relate. No one can do anything more than slowly shuffle forward, both surrounded and isolated at the same time.

This isolation is the danger Jesus envisions when he places a little child among his disciples. They’ve been arguing about which one of them is the greatest (in other words, which one of them should be first in line). The prevailing linear culture has thoroughly molded the disciples. They only understand relationships in terms of hierarchy based on class, gender, and age. But they’ve been hanging around Jesus long enough to know that Jesus is thoroughly countercultural. He talks with women. He eats with outcasts. He touches the unclean. And so the disciples lapse into embarrassed silence when Jesus asks them about the content of their argument. They know they’ve provided Jesus with what would now be called a “teachable moment.”

The disciples expect something countercultural and that’s exactly what Jesus gives them: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” To illustrate the revolutionary nature of this statement, Jesus brings a small child and places the child among the disciples – not before them or after them, but among them. In Jesus’ day, this child was the last of the last. The hierarchy of the society placed children just below farm animals because you could get a lot more out of a goat than a toddler, and the goat would probably live longer. Children had no rights or protections. They weren’t even considered people until they were old enough to work.

But Jesus ignores this cruel stratification when he says: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Jesus commands his disciples and us to welcome those whom society deems lowest of all. With this welcome comes the opportunity to see the faces and learn the stories of those who until now were at the end of the line, too far removed from us to register on our radar. And as we hear the stories of the lowest and the last, we seek ways to serve them and serve with them.

But one of the greatest mistakes of our time has been the Western presumption that we know what’s best for the people we serve: “You might not have said you need a well in your village, but we’re going to come and build one anyway.” This imperialistic attitude only perpetuates the linear model, which our service should be attempting to supplant. However, with his command to welcome, Jesus doesn’t allow us to develop a “serve first and ask questions later” mentality. Welcoming provides the framework through which service leads to the building up of relationships.

With his emphasis on relationships, Jesus changes the existing linear model into a circular one. In the line, you can’t welcome anyone because all you see are the backs of heads. You can’t serve anyone because the implied hierarchy of the line makes isolation the norm. You can only count the number of people ahead of you and nurse your own indignation over your rotten place in line. But in the circle, there is no first and no last. We can grasp hands in welcome precisely because we will be unable to quantify our position in the continuous round. And relationships have a chance to flourish because we look not at backs but at each other’s faces.

This circular model of welcome and service stands in laughable contrast to the current situation in this country. Too many incidents to count show that the tired old scourge of racism is alive and well. The drive to produce leads to longer hours, more work, and more money, but assuredly less happiness, less camaraderie. The gap between the rich and the poor grows ever wider. Each of these examples depends on the linear model continuing to thrive. And it is. So here we sit with our Lord challenging us to do something, which the loudest voices on the other side of those doors claim is utter nonsense.

To be first you must be last of all and servant of all, he says. Let go of linear relationships based on power and ambition and embrace circular relationships based on welcome and service. If you are standing near the front of the line now, start walking to the back. Grab the hand of the last person in line and form the circle. Welcome the least among us. Listen to their needs, their desires, their dreams. Form new relationships. Partner with them in service because we are only as strong as our weakest members. Jesus invites us over and over again to accomplish these things. And Jesus never issues an invitation without simultaneously offering the gifts needed to embrace it.

So to every fourth grader lining up after recess and to every businessperson lining up at Starbucks and to everyone whose ambition blinds him or her to those standing on tiptoes in the back: Give up your place in line.

Mistaken Identity

Published on September 14, 2015October 5, 2015 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, September 13, 2015 || Proper 19B || Mark 8:27-38

This week has been a particularly tough one for our twins, Charlie and Amelia. At thirteen and a half months, we think they are cutting their molars, so their extreme fussiness is understandable. On Tuesday, I walked in the door of the kitchen, and before I had taken three steps, Charlie was toddling up to me as fast as his little legs and precarious balance would allow. He ran into me and buried his head between my knees, which is his way of saying, “Pick me up, Daddy.” I hefted him into my arms. He put his arms around my neck and his head on my shoulder. And for the next twenty minutes, I just walked around, holding him and speaking softly into his ear. It was a special moment, a physical heart to heart.

The next morning, I was preparing to write this sermon and reading Jesus’ question over and over again: “Who do you say that I am?” And this question about identity got me thinking about Charlie, about how he would answer the question if it were asked about me. Who does Charlie say that I am? I think Charlie’s answer and Peter’s answer share a lot in common.

You see, Charlie’s first word was “Dada.” Early on he used it for everything, so it wasn’t really my name, it was just what he said. Then, as the months progressed, Charlie’s collection of sounds increased, “Dada” became “Daddy,” and, for the most part, focused in on my personage. He says “Daddy” in the sweetest, high-pitched singsong that melts my heart like butter. And yet, I wonder what his toddler’s mind imagines when he identifies me.

Judging by the way he wanted to be held on Tuesday, the way he clung to me so fiercely, the way he calmed down immediately when he was safe in my arms, I think I have a lot to live up to. In his eyes, my identity must be larger-than-life. I am, quite literally, the largest person he sees regularly. And I’m not around as much as Mommy, so there’s an air of mystery to my presence, a rock star quality. I’m a super hero. I just don’t have any super powers. I can remember the exact, illusion-bursting moment in my own adolescence when I realized my parents were not the infallible super heroes I always took them for. And I wonder when Charlie and Amelia will figure that out about me.

Identity is a tricky, slippery thing. Our identities are multi-faceted. They are synthesized and refined and redefined throughout our lifetimes as we gain new skills and interests, as we adapt to new circumstances and relationships, as we deal with success and failure. For example, for nineteen years (about 60 percent of my life) “student” was the most important facet of my identity, but no longer is. The importance of one facet of identity might rise or fall in direct proportion to another. My identity as “sports fan” has fallen significantly with the rise of my identity as “father.” Identity is also a negotiation between what we think about ourselves and others’ expectations of us. If someone asks me, “Are you a golfer,” I always respond the same way. “I own golf clubs.” I don’t want that person to generate an undue expectation of me, as someone with a handicap less than the maximum.

The reality (or unreality) of expectation is where Charlie’s and Peter’s answer to the question converge. Who do you say that I am? You are the Daddy: bottle giver, tantrum calmer, crib rescuer, super hero! You are the Messiah. And while Peter doesn’t expand on this identity, his reaction to Jesus’ explanation of it shows us what Peter’s expectation is. You are the Messiah: Israel’s deliverer, Rome’s exterminator, mighty warrior, sure victor. It’s no wonder Peter takes Jesus aside to clarify things. Jesus is obviously mistaken. Had he heard Peter right? Peter had said “messiah,” not “sacrificial lamb,” not “victim.”

Bur Jesus had heard Peter. Jesus could sense the underlying expectation of such a baggage-laden identity as “messiah.” That’s why he starts speaking openly for the first time in the entire Gospel. He needs to clarify things. He needs to make sure his disciples know just what he thinks the identity of “messiah” means. If he had wanted to live into the militaristic expectation of “messiah,” he probably wouldn’t have recruited fisherman. “Look around,” he seems to say to his disciples. “I don’t have an army. I have you guys. I haven’t been fighting. I’ve been healing.”

We follow Jesus precisely because his expectation of “messiah” runs counter to Peter’s. We follow Jesus because he chose not to fight. We follow Jesus because he gloried not in destruction, but in resurrection, in new life, in deep relationship that lasts beyond death. That’s Jesus identity as “messiah.” He suffered not because suffering is good, but because suffering was the natural outgrowth of his taking on the isolating, dominating, death-dealing machinery of this world. We follow Jesus because we believe he won that fight by not fighting back, by not fighting fire with fire, but by clogging the machine with the love, grace, and peace of God.

And that brings us to our own identity as followers. “If any want to become my followers,” says Jesus, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It’s quite possible this isn’t what we signed up for. It’s quite possible we expected more comforting words. Perhaps we expected Jesus to say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” Perhaps we expected Jesus to say, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Perhaps we expected Jesus to say, “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Well, the good news is this: Jesus does say all those things. It is these promises of rest and relationship and abundant life that make us able to accept his strident expectation of identifying as his followers. Denying ourselves means letting go of our stranglehold on our own lives – our self-determination, our bootstraps mentality – in order to allow Christ to live in us. And when Christ lives in us, we find we can resist the machinery of this world. We take up the cross because from the cross Jesus beckoned everything that’s wrong with this world to come die with him. When we come to the cross, we come face to face with all the manifestations of evil, snarling in its death throes. It’s a scary place, teeming with poverty, racism, disease, violence. But this is the place our followers’ footsteps lead us because this is the place we partner with Christ to bring resurrection and new life.

Someday, Charlie is going to realize I’m not the super hero he thought I was. That expectation will crack, and our relationship will change. Some days, we follow Christ more closely than other days. Some days, the identity of follower takes us to dark places, despite our expectations. But that identity takes us there because part of being a follower is being a light-bearer to such darkness. The light we bear is the light of Christ, our healer-messiah. And our identity as followers is safe in his hands because no amount of evil or darkness will ever extinguish his light.

Be Opened

Published on September 8, 2015September 28, 2015 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, September 6, 2015 || Proper 18B || Mark 7:24-37

You might be wondering if I accidentally read two weeks worth of Gospel lessons just now. The story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman ended satisfactorily, and at that point I could have said, “The Gospel of the Lord.” But the appointed lesson for today barrels forward into the next story, as well, and we read about Jesus healing a man who cannot hear and can hardly speak. We could focus on either half of this Gospel reading: there surely is enough in each to fill out a sermon. But today, I’m going to break a rule of preaching and bite off more verses than I normally do because I think the Gospel writer Mark places these two stories side-by-side for a reason. And this reason centers on the strangest word in the passage, a word that itself needs to be translated because Mark chose to preserve Jesus’ original language when he wrote it down. That word is “Ephphatha”: Be opened. Openness is the key to these two encounters. And openness is one of the keys to our lives as followers of Jesus Christ.

But before we get to openness proper, we need to address the historic challenge of the first encounter in our passage. For hundreds and hundreds of years, faithful readers of scripture have had more trouble with the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman than almost any other story in the Gospel. The main issue boils down to this: Jesus seems to change his mind after the woman’s response to his rather rude statement about dogs eating the children’s food. If Jesus is who he says he is, the argument goes, then how could he possibly be induced to change his mind? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to saying he’s wrong about something?

You can see why people of all stripes – scholars, clergy, laypersons – have trouble with this story. It has always made me a little spiritually itchy, as well, to be honest. And because of this trouble, people throughout history have used some (shall we say) flexible interpretive gymnastics to bend the encounter until it fits into their conception of who Jesus is. “Jesus was going heal the little girl all along,” says the most common acrobatic interpretation. “He was just testing her mother.” Another goes: “Jesus is simply moved by her plight. That’s why he gives in to her request.”

While these might be fine interpretations of the passage, they miss the simplest explanation entirely because they are not open to the possibility that Jesus might just be wrong in this case. But let’s for a moment step out of this history of interpretive gymnastics and imagine such a possibility. Let’s see if there is some good news in a story about Jesus being wrong and changing his mind.

The first thing to notice is the status of the other person in the encounter. Right away, Mark gives us three reasons why this woman would normally be dismissed in Jesus’ day and age (and perhaps ours, as well). She’s a woman. She’s a foreigner. And she has a child with some challenges. That’s three strikes, three excuses others would use to marginalize her. And this is the person who teaches Jesus something.

She comes to Jesus and implores him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He responds with what sounds like a stock retort of the day, complete with ethnic slur (and let me assure you, “dog” is the mildest translation of the word). But the woman takes the slur and turns it around, in effect saying: “Listen to me. Take me seriously. I might not have a seat at the table but I deserve to be fed.”

And then something astounding happens. I imagine Jesus standing there, dazed for a minute, then his features softening as he realizes how closed off he is being, how stuck in a cultural norm, how unlike his usual self who is always pushing boundaries and rubbing shoulders with outsiders. The woman’s response jars him out this unusual narrowness. “Good answer,” he says – not just because it gets her what she wants but because it also helps Jesus reassert his normal posture of openness.

The beauty of living a life of openness is illustrated in the next encounter. People bring to Jesus a man who cannot hear and can hardly talk. Jesus looks him over, touches him, and says, “Ephphatha”: Be opened. Immediately, the man is able to hear and speak. Jesus could have said any number of things to heal this man. Or he didn’t have to say anything at all. And yet the word he chooses is a word of openness. That’s what’s on Jesus’ mind when he heals the man – not just the mechanical action of opening his ears and releasing his tongue, but the greater reality that open ears convey, the deeper meaning of Ephphatha.

Be open. Do not let your preconceptions deafen you to new ideas. In our world today, we can pick and choose the voices who influence us, and human nature pushes us towards voices we already agree with. The arguments we expose ourselves to in such a partisan climate often pit the best of one side against the worst of the other, or else have no basis in reality in the first place. The loudest voices in the media are always the most extreme. And yet underneath that layer of bluster, there are other, quieter, smarter men and women who disagree with each other and take the time to appreciate and understand one another’s views. They may not change their minds like Jesus does in the story, but the openness exists, nonetheless.

Be open. Do not let innate tribalism keep you from getting to know people unlike yourself. We all fall into this trap. We like people who remind us of ourselves. This isn’t a bad thing at all. But it’s also not the only thing. Rubbing shoulders with people unlike us – in whatever way the differences present – has a way of broadening us, giving us greater awareness, growing in us more empathy, more solidarity. It’s no wonder that the person who reminds Jesus of his usual openness is so unlike him.

Be open. Pray for the trust that leads to openness. Open your hands to receive. Then open your hands again to give. Walk with your arms outstretched, open to embrace the call God places in your heart. Ask God to open your heart to welcome whoever walks across your threshold, to listen to experience that differ from your own, to learn what others have to teach.

I truly believe Jesus learned something that day from the Syrophoenician woman, or perhaps remembered something he had forgotten. She teaches him to embrace his openness and then returns home to a demon-free daughter. Jesus returns home, too, and meets a man who is physically closed off. Be opened are his words of healing to that man, who then cannot contain his raucous proclamation. And just as Jesus lived a life of openness to God and to those people whom most never bothered to see, Jesus gives us the same invitation today. Ephphatha. Be open.

Action Verbs

Published on August 31, 2015September 20, 2015 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, August 30, 2015 || Proper 17 || James 1:17-27

My tenth grade English teacher, Mrs. Lewis, disliked linking verbs – passionately disliked linking verbs. She disliked linking verbs so much that she would count the number of times we students used the words “is” and “was” (and all the others) in our papers and deduct points if we exceeded more than one or two per paragraph. She nursed a particular vendetta against the word “become,” if memory serves. Do you know how hard it is to write a paper with next to no linking verbs? (I just used one in the last sentence, and you probably didn’t even notice.) Now we students grumbled about this strict grading procedure every time we wrote an essay, but Mrs. Lewis stuck to her guns. And God love her for it, because I count Mrs. Lewis as one of the teachers that made me the writer I am today. (Dang! I just used another linking verb.)

By forcing us to use action verbs, Mrs. Lewis taught us to make our essays hum with energy and movement. I remember editing my papers to ferret out every last linking verb and trying to shove as much action as I could into them. The sentence “The Lord of the Flies is a book about the aftermath of a plane crash” changed to “In The Lord of Flies, boys survive a plane crash, but not each other.” Sounds like a movie trailer right? That’s what Mrs. Lewis was pushing for – pulsing, active writing from a group of tenth graders who didn’t really care that much.

I think Mrs. Lewis had a little bit of the Apostle James in her, judging by his letter tucked away near the back of the New Testament, a portion of which we just read. “Be doers of the word,” says James, “and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” Be doers of the word. Use action verbs in your life. The Word of God is not just words on the pages of a dusty book on the shelf. The Word of God rushes up off those pages and implants in our hearts. The Word of God propels us to get ourselves off the couch and do something. Be doers of the word.

Throughout his somewhat labyrinthine prose, James hammers on this point again and again. At the end of today’s passage, James offers a rare moment of succinct clarity: true religion, he says, “is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” James uses action verbs: care for the marginalized, and keep yourself clean, unsullied by the misplaced priorities of the world.

In a few moments, we will stand up and say a host of action verbs, as well. We will affirm our Baptismal Covenant, standing with the soon-to-be-baptized and renewing the actions that our baptismal life compels us to do. I know many of you were baptized long before the Baptismal Covenant was even written, but I hope since its publishing in 1979 you have come to adopt it as your own. The Baptismal Covenant is the Episcopal Church’s own rare moment of succinct clarity, like James’s caring for orphans and widows. The Covenant begins with belief – an adapted version of the Apostles’ Creed – and then moves on to five promises that this belief stirs us to act upon.

Mrs. Lewis would like these five promises. There’s not a linking verb to be found. Every verb in these five promises propels us to act.

“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” The verb “continue” assumes these actions of learning, sharing, and praying have always been ongoing. These actions have persisted since the time of the apostles, and we are stepping into the ever-flowing stream of their legacy. This first promise invites us to join a movement already in progress and lend it our hands and voice and heart.

The second promise: “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?” The verb “persevere” speaks to the weariness that creeps in while we resist evil. Evil wears us down, preferring not to strike all at once, but rather to gnaw on us while we’re not looking, until we do look one day and find there’s nothing left. But we promise to persevere and to repent and return to God when we do fall into sin. Notice we don’t say “if” we fall into sin. We say “when,” which is why God always leaves open to us the actions of repenting and returning.

The third promise: “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?” The verb “proclaim” urges much more than mere speaking. We’re talking about shouting from the rooftops here; we’re talking about putting your whole self forward, staking a claim, taking a stand, making your words line up with your actions. That’s proclamation. And what are we proclaiming? The Good News of God in Christ – I can’t think of anything worthier of such a strong verb as “proclaim.”

The fourth promise: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” Seek, serve, love – this is the heart of our duty and our joy as followers of Jesus Christ. If you take this promise seriously, you soon realize just how hard it is to embody. But Jesus never said being his follower would be easy. He said it would bring life – abundant life to each follower and each person his followers touch.

The fifth promise: “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” The verb “strive” is like the verb “persevere.” It reminds us that we will never be done working for justice and peace. There is no happily-ever-after this side of heaven. But perhaps in the daily working for justice, we move an inch closer than we were before: a quarter teaspoon more fairness stirs into the mix, a splash more peace, and that’s all we can do for today. And it all starts simply by respecting everyone’s dignity, looking each person in the eye and saying, “We’re all in this together.”

In response to each promise, we say, “I will, with God’s help.” We acknowledge that we can take none of these actions without God’s patient urging and steadfast partnership. Our baptism is not just a symbolic act of washing and welcome. Our baptism catalyzes a life of action. With God’s help, we continue in learning, sharing, and praying. We persevere in resisting evil. We repent and return to the Lord. We proclaim the Good News. We seek, serve, and love Christ in others. We strive for justice and peace. We respect all people.

I wonder which of these actions captures you today? I wonder which action compels you to leave this church today on fire to do it? I wonder what rare moment of succinct clarity you hear from God this day? Each of us is a doer of the word. So go with God: learn, share, pray, persevere, repent, proclaim, seek, serve, love, strive, respect. Each of us is a doer of the word. So go with God. Do.

The Rock and the River

Published on August 24, 2015September 14, 2015 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, August 23, 2015 || Proper 16B || John 6:56-69; Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18

Today we complete our long, five-week march through the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to John. We read every last word, some of them multiple times. Jesus fed the crowds – five thousand strong – with one person’s groceries. He walked on water to meet his companions across the sea. He spoke to the crowds at length, hoping to move them past their rumbling tummies to the deeper craving for the “bread of life”; that is, the sustenance of abiding relationship with him. But the people don’t get it. They aren’t ready to hear what he has to say. And yet, Jesus keeps pushing. He keeps extending the metaphor, making it more explicit, until he’s talking about eating and drinking his own flesh and blood.

To this many of his disciples respond, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And they stopped following Jesus that day. They “turned back and no longer went about with him,” John narrates. I bet – in that moment as they were wandering away back to their old lives – Jesus could feel the power to compel them to stay surge up within him. I bet he knew that if only he willed it, they would turn around and come back, like dogs on leashes. But Jesus knew better. He knew that every person had to be free to choose to leave, or else it wouldn’t ever be worth staying.

After they leave, he turns to his twelve most faithful companions, his inner circle, and asks them a question. I always hear a thick sadness in his voice when I read these words: “Do you also wish to go away?” In that moment teetering on despair, Peter gives Jesus a gift: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

In John’s Gospel, belief is synonymous with relationship. So when Peter says these words, he affirms his relationship with Jesus, despite any perplexity Jesus’ words about flesh and blood might have caused him. This is the same Peter who later denies knowing Jesus three times on the terrifying night of Jesus’ arrest and trial. And this is the same Peter who even later has this denial healed when Jesus asks three times if Peter loves him. Peter’s real name is Simon. Jesus nicknames him Peter, which means “Rock.” You may recall in another account of the Gospel Jesus making a pun: I call you Peter/Rock, and on this Rock I will build my church.

When you call someone a rock, you mean she is steadfast to the end. “Patty was a rock the whole time her daughter was in the hospital.” That may seem true from the outsider’s perspective, but the real story probably looks more variable – like Peter’s. Maybe Patty held it together whenever she and her daughter had visitors. After all, in an odd but predictable reversal of roles, it often falls on the people involved in a tragedy to comfort those coming to visit. Of course, she was a rock when visitors came around. But how many times did Patty break down sobbing in the middle of the night by her daughter’s bedside, alone but for the steady beeping of the machines? How many times did despair creep in? How many times did she rage at God (a totally appropriate reaction to her situation, mind you)?

I seriously doubt that anyone who’s ever been called a “rock” ever felt like one themselves. In our example, Patty might even feel some misplaced shame for her lack of stability if people label her “rock,” no matter how well meaning they are. Throughout the Gospel and the book of Acts, we can see Peter trying to live up to his nickname, only to fail on multiple occasions. One of these failures actually leads to a huge expansion of the early church, when the Rock realizes he is wrong and changes his mind.

All this to say that the life of faith is much more variable than many of us desire or are comfortable with. None of us is on a perfectly straight road like the Interstates out in the mid-West. Rather our lives of faith run more like rivers or streams – twisting around boulders, bubbling through rapids, tumbling down waterfalls, flowing swiftly, flowing lazily, sometimes stagnating, sometimes surging.

And it has always been this way. In the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures this morning, Joshua puts a choice before the Israelites: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Will it be the lifeless and false gods of the peoples of the land or will it be the Lord. Joshua answers for himself first: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” All the people answer the same way: “We also will serve the Lord, for he is our God.” But it doesn’t take long for this promise to fade into obscurity. In fact, the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures narrate the story of the people of Israel oscillating between following God and throwing their lot in with some other convenient deity of the month.

So why is the life of faith so much more variable than many of desire or are comfortable with? Well, because we don’t have two lives – a normal life and a life of faith. We just have life. And life is all about change. If we labored under the delusion that our faith could not and should not have some variability, then that faith would never line up authentically with the rest of our lives. It would be as disconnected from us as a Midwestern Interstate is from a stream meandering down a mountain.

I urge you, therefore, not to beat yourself up when you don’t feel as faithful as you did last week or last year. There are periods of time when each of us – including me – are lost in the desert. But the good news is this: in the end, our faith or lack thereof is only a part of the story, and a small part of the story at that. God’s steadfastness matters much more than ours. The story of the Hebrew Scriptures is not just the one about people turning away from God; it’s also the one about God continually calling them back. Remember, God was there in the desert, too.

This interplay between God and God’s people finds expression in a curious grammatical ambiguity that crops up in many of St. Paul’s letters. In several places Paul is either talking about “faith in Jesus Christ” (that is, our faith) or “faith of Jesus Christ” (that is, Jesus’ own faith). It could mean either, and Paul probably wants it to mean both. The steadfast faith of Jesus Christ, who is the true Rock (no matter Simon Peter’s nickname), holds our faith for us when we are too angry or too sad or too distracted or too apathetic to access it ourselves. In this, the faith of Jesus Christ is like our regent, ruling in the place of us, the infant kings and queens, until we are ready to take up the mantle.

I like to think that some of those folks who walked away from Jesus came back another day because they realized they were still hungry and only his words of truth could fill them. I like to think they once again took up the mantle of faith. The same goes for us. The invitations that Jesus Christ offers to us to join him in his work of healing and reconciliation will never stop arriving at our doorsteps. His faith in us activates our faith in him. Our meandering streams can each day meet his surging river. Why not today?

Wisdom’s Cry

Published on August 17, 2015September 8, 2015 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, August 16, 2015 || Proper 15B || Proverbs 9:1-6

Homo sapiens. That’s what Carl Linnaeus, the 18^th century biologist, called the human species. All living organisms in his influential system of taxonomy are given two Latin names, a genus and species. There’s Canis lupus – dog.* There’s Felis catus – cat. There’s Macropus rufus – red kangaroo. And then there’s Homo sapiens – modern day human. The “sapiens” distinguishes us from other extinct species of hominid like Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Carl Linnaeus used the word “sapiens” to describe our species because, like any good Enlightenment thinker, he prized the human abilities to gain and retain knowledge, to question and understand, to solve problems, and to discern. Sapiens, after all, comes from the Latin word that means “wisdom.”

I often wonder, however, if this scientific classification – Homo sapiens – is losing its accuracy in today’s world. Indeed, modern American society has become a hostile environment for wisdom. Wisdom thrives when deep thinkers share their deep thoughts with one another and discover new territory for exploration. Wisdom thrives when thoroughness and care gain the upper hand over speed and ease. Wisdom thrives when we take the time to listen to our grandparents. But in modern American society deep thinkers don’t have the luxury to share their deep thoughts because the 15-second sound byte is all that will get quoted by the news. The 140-character limit of a tweet serves only the surface level of a discussion. The fact that you all give me ten minutes a week to share what little wisdom I’ve gleaned in my 32 years on this planet is practically a marvel. It’s certainly countercultural. In today’s world, how could we possibly be expected to sit through ten minutes of anything?

And still, the brevity and pace of our modern discourse is only part of what makes our society a hostile environment for wisdom. Ever since the advent of the Internet, we have slowly but surely been outsourcing our brains into devices. And as the devices have gotten smaller and more portable, the pace of this outsourcing has accelerated.

Here’s a common example of cranial outsourcing, one that I’m sure many of you can relate to. I know exactly three phone numbers by heart: I know my cell phone number, Leah’s cell phone number, and the number for St. Mark’s. That’s it. I don’t know my parents’ phone numbers. I don’t know my sister’s phone number. I don’t know the numbers of any of my friends. But in the prehistoric, pre-cellular days of the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, I knew every one of my friends’ numbers by heart. I probably had 40 or 50 phone numbers crammed in my head. And so did everyone else. But we, as a species, have lost this capacity, because we have outsourced phone number collection to our devices.

This is one fairly innocuous example of cranial outsourcing. Others include the inability to calculate a tip at a restaurant; or to make change at a cash register; or, perhaps most ubiquitously, to drive somewhere without turn-by-turn GPS instructions. I have friends who have been to my house four or five times and have absolutely no idea how to get there. The Internet and related technology have given us the opportunity to download all of human knowledge and most of human capacity into machines. And we took that opportunity without even blinking.

The coupling of our sound-byte society with our cranial outsourcing has begun the process of evolving us into a new species, I’m afraid – one where the “sapiens” of Homo sapiens is a misnomer. While there are certainly still bastions of wisdom out there (notably, the aforementioned grandparents), I’m not sure generations to come can expect innate wisdom from their elders like we can. I’m honestly afraid my millennial generation has neither the attention span nor the cognitive discipline to gain wisdom. When knowledge, experience, and empathy are brewed together over time in an atmosphere of unhurried reflection, wisdom is the result. But these days, most knowledge lives in machines. Experience is gained second hand through the media. Empathy can barely survive in the toxic, anonymous climate of Internet comment sections. And too few things, reflection among them, are done in an unhurried manner.

So when I read the words of today’s lesson from the book of Proverbs, I hear a clear, yet plaintive cry from Wisdom herself calling us away from our modern American lifestyle; calling us, instead, back home. Indeed, the reading begins as such: “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn seven pillars.” Seven pillars – a number of completion in the Bible, of divine perfection. In this house, Wisdom has laid a sumptuous feast and has sent out her servants with an invitation to be shouted from the rooftops. All you naïve people, she says; all you who lack sense, come here. Eat my bread, drink my wine. “Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”

The book of Proverbs personifies Wisdom throughout its chapters. She is called God’s first created being, there with God at the creation of all other things. She implores people to despise pride and arrogance and to embrace prudence, knowledge, discretion, righteousness, justice. She laments being roundly ignored by the foolhardy. Wisdom has been around the block a few times, and today she invites us again not to forget her, but to feast in her house. This is vital for our walks with God because so much of that walk with and toward God follows the road that leads to wisdom.

The Wisdom Road we could be walking has become obscured in our modern American society. But we can take steps to clear away the brush and brambles, to hack back the overhanging branches, to uncover the well-worn path so many have trudged along in days gone by.

The first step is to recognize the extent of our cranial outsourcing and try to arrest its growth. Reclaim some hard drive space in the old gray matter. Try not to use your turn-by-turn GPS for a week. Yes, you might get lost, but getting lost is how you start learning the roads. When you retrieve information from the Internet, try to keep it in your brain instead of letting it drift away back to virtual space.

Second, take the time to have some real, honest-to-goodness experiences, and then take even more time to reflect on them. Have some deep conversations. Discuss things that really matter. Go out and rub shoulders with folks you might not normally associate with. Get your hands dirty. Serve.

Third, practice empathy in every conversation and interaction you have. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your companion and feel what he or she is feeling. In all of these, spend time in reflection so that your knowledge and experience has time to grow roots and sprout into wisdom. Some of you are grandparents already, so I’m sure you’ve got wisdom to spare. Perhaps you can help us young `uns stop and hear wisdom’s invitation to the feast. The Wisdom Road and the road God calls us to walk share quite a bit of pavement. Let’s walk it together.

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* It was pointed out to me (while I was preaching at the 10 am service) that this is actually a wolf and that dog is Canis familiaris. Oops.

Promise. Invitation. Mission.

Published on August 10, 2015August 31, 2015 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, August 9, 2015 || Proper 14B || John 6:35, 41-51

It’s great to be back with you after three weeks away. I spent much of my vacation traveling to Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Tennessee. I visited a friend going through an agonizing medical issue and reconnected with an old friend from college. I got to shoot a bow and arrow, which I haven’t done since I earned the archery merit badge about twenty years ago. And I got to hang out with the now one-year-old twins and their mother a lot. It was a good vacation. But I’m glad to be back with you ready to preach a sermon about six of my favorite words in the Gospel. Those six words are: “I am the bread of life.” Embedded in these words are three things that so often dance beneath the surface of what Jesus says: a promise, an invitation, and a mission.

But before we get to these three things, we need to mention one of the idiosyncrasies of the Gospel according to John. In John, Jesus desires to tell everyone exactly who he is. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he is more circumspect about his identity: he keeps it secret for the most part, preferring instead to let others draw their own conclusions when they witness his actions and hear his words. But John’s Jesus keeps no secrets; instead, he presents truth wrapped in deep mystery and captivating imagery. The enigmatic quality of some of Jesus’ statements can make it seem like he’s keeping secrets, but the difference between secret and mystery is that secrets want to stay hidden and mysteries want to be revealed.

John lets us know of this desire for revelation right from the start with these poetic lines: “The Word became flesh and made his home among us. We have seen his glory, glory like that of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God. God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made God known” (1:14, 18 CEB). With these two beautiful verses of poetry, John presents Jesus’ task. Jesus Christ – God the only Son, the Word made flesh – came to make God known to us by making his home among us. By revealing his own identity, Jesus reveals God’s identity, and when we encounter this revelation, we discover who we are, too.

Jesus signals when he is disclosing this divine revelation with a pair of code words: “I Am.” He says these words a couple dozen times in the Gospel according to John, and each time they hearken back to God’s encounter with Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks God for God’s name, God responds, “I Am Who I Am.” Jesus borrows these words in his conversation with the crowd the day after the feeding of the five thousand. Their minds are still on yesterday’s bread, so he runs with that image. “I am the bread of life,” he says. These words are so much greater than mere metaphor; they reveal a piece of Jesus’ divine identity. And remember: when we encounter this revelation, we discover who we are, too.

To make this discovery, let’s return to the three things dancing beneath the surface of Jesus words: “I am the bread of life.” There’s a promise, an invitation, and a mission all squeezed in those six words. First, the promise.

Jesus links his identity as the bread of life to his people’s communal memory of the flight from Egypt many hundreds of years prior. Reading Exodus Chapter 16, you might notice how the people begin complaining to Moses about their hunger as soon as the threat of the Egyptians has vanished. If the situation weren’t so dire, it would be comical: the moment the threat is gone, they realize their stomachs are rumbling. And then the histrionics start: “Oh, how we wish that the Lord had just put us to death while we were still in the land of Egypt…You’ve brought us out into this desert to starve this whole assembly to death” (16:3 CEB). Of course, God has other plans and begins providing for them immediately with manna that appears like dew six mornings a week. Each day they collect enough to sustain them for that day, and they receive a warning not to store up the manna for tomorrow because it will spoil. They had to trust the manna would appear the next day, too. And you know what? It did.* That’s the promise Jesus makes when he names himself the “bread of life.” He promises to be the daily source of nourishment for his people, as the manna was during the wandering in the desert.

We receive this daily nourishment when we respond to Jesus’ invitation. As he talks to the crowd, Jesus tries to move them away from focusing on their physical craving for the barley loaves they received the day before and toward a deeper craving – the desire for relationship. When we take in the “bread of life,” Jesus becomes a part of us, as close to us as we are to ourselves. He invites us into the intimacy of this relationship, a relationship built on daily trust that we stand in his sustaining presence whether or not we have the eyes and heart to notice it. Think of the manna clinging to the grass like dew. How easy would it have been to trample right over it, too caught up in our hunger to notice our nourishment all around us? When he says, “I am the bread of life,” Jesus invites us to stop, to notice, and to take him in.

Because we’re not too good at that stopping and noticing, the church ritualized this taking him in. We call it Holy Communion, and when we come to the altar rail in a few minutes, we’ll find that Jesus’ promise and invitation have blossomed into our mission. We kneel together as the Body of Christ to receive the Body of Christ. We are knit one to another and all to God through Christ who dwells in us as we dwell in him. We rediscover that we are stronger together than we are alone. The “bread of life” provides us nourishment in order that together we may become nourishment to a hungry world. In the book of Genesis, God blesses Abraham to be a blessing – not so that he can be rich and famous and secure – but so that he will be a blessing. In the same way, our relationship with Christ, our reliance on his sustaining presence, is not for ourselves alone. We are blessed to be blessings, as well. We are nourished to be nourishment.

When we encounter Jesus’ revelation of his identity, we discover who we are, too. Our identity is wrapped up in the promise, invitation, and mission Jesus reveals when he says, “I am the bread of life.” By naming himself the “bread of life,” Jesus promises to sustain us like the manna in the desert. By eating of his bread, we accept the invitation to be in relationship with him. By sharing it together, we participate in the deeper reality of being members of the Body of Christ. We remember we’re not in this alone. We remember that God calls us to serve and to be served. We remember that the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are participating in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation in this world. That is where our true identity finds its home. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus promises. “Come to me. Be fed so you might feed others. Be blessed to be a blessing.”

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