It's the oddity of my journey as a transitional deacon that I am serving in two parishes; hence I am preaching three weeks in a row. Last week, it was St. Barnabas. This week, it was Christ the King.
A word about this congregation: back in the late 1980s, the Rev. Stan White took the extraordinary step to take his entire Pentecostal congregation with him into the Episcopal Church. There was a mass confirmation service, an instantly, Valdosta, Georgia, gained a whole new Episcopal Church. The music is straight up Gospel. People clap, snap, sway and pray with hands lifted to the heavens. It is a much different experience for this Episcopalian with more Anglo-Catholic leanings!
Their interim rector, who is my supervising priest, has perfected the art of preaching without notes or a script. I am not that person...and I felt the need to apologize to the assembly that I wasn't going to engage with them in the same way. I also wanted them to know that I don't say "Amen" at the end of my sermons because that "Amen" is their confirmation that they've heard me. Good news: everyone was able to roll with my differences. Even if it may have felt a little weird....
And so speaking of weird things…John’s Gospel with bread that is
flesh and blood…and now Jesus has added “Spirit” and “Life” into the mix!
I wasn’t with y’all last week, but Mother Galen has already noted
that the “bread” is metaphorical. And in fact…Jesus isn’t advocating for
cannibalism with eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
Rather…this is the importance of having a deep and intimate
relationship with him. That puts us in a similar deep and intensely intimate
relationship with God.
Our Evangelist John has a point he wants to make about Jesus: he is
the Word made flesh. And by consuming…or bringing Jesus into our selves…really
having faith in him…we will be transformed.
And here’s the kicker: that transformation will enliven us…and give
our spirits life…so that we might do the work of Christ in the world…to bring
good news to the poor…release to the captives…and freedom to the oppressed.
We might even start to sense how we are interconnected with each
other and that the spiritual world is not removed the material world around us.
It’s a little bit like what God tells the prophet Ezekiel when God talks about
replacing the heart of stone with a heart of flesh.
For our Evangelist John…there is no other way than to go all in
with Jesus.
We are to…as we say over the water at a baptism…be buried with
Christ and brought through death to resurrection…having been reborn by the Holy
Spirit (BCP, 306). That’s what it means to be a member of the Christian faith…sealed
and marked as Christ’s own forever.
And that sounds a little weird…us dying and being born all at once.
One of the brothers at St. John the Evangelist up in Boston, MA, Br. Keith Nelson, describes this as “the paradox
of Christian faith…a collision of opposites.” We must die to our own
self-interests in order to be made fully alive in Christ. This is how we abide
in him as he abides in us.
We see how well THAT went over with Jesus’ followers back in the
First Century!
They grumble…“This is hard, man.”
“Nah, that’s OK. I think I’ll be on my way now.”
“Thanks for the fish…….and the bread.”
Jesus…laying claim to all of us…not just that part of us that shows
up on Sunday for prayers and the praise is a frightening proposition.
And fear…the enemy of hope…is almost like the “go-to” emotion of our
fragile egos that don’t want to give up any ground to make room for God!
To really live into this call to be a Christian means we must align
ourselves to see others in the same way Christ does: as God’s equally beloved
children.
Even the person who is irritating us by how long they are taking in
the check-out line or doesn’t see eye to eye with us politically.
How many times do we fail to recognize that love and grace is
extended to us let alone someone else?!
We have a God who loves in abundance…will even lay down his life
for us…calls on us to do the same and give up our self-centered ways to look
out for those who are being left behind.
This teaching was hard for the disciples of the First Century…and
it is very hard for us too. Just like then…people turn away from this light and
go back into their darkened corners.
It’s not that we don’t WANT to follow Jesus. But to be in
relationship with Jesus? A love so high we can’t get over it or so wide we
can’t get around it? And wants our whole being to be infused with that great a
love? Again…our fragile egos start to quiver and shake…and wonder “What happens
if I let go? Who am I if I don’t separate myself from the other?”
To live into our calling to be Christ-like…hence Christians…means
we won’t be popular.
We are called on to see ourselves as deeply reflected in the eyes
of the other and the world around us…and to care and not look away.
We should suffer when we see images of frightened Afghanis clinging
to an American aircraft taking off from Kabul…or our own citizens beating
police officers at the nation’s capitol.
We should weep at the thought of Haitians already reeling from one
earthquake and the assassination of their president…suffering yet another
earthquake.
We should have concern for the healthcare workers stretched thin
and worn-out from saving people’s lives from COVID.
And…we should also be moved in our innermost being when we gaze
upon the way a South Georgia sunset paints the sky with blues, and yellows and
orange over tops of grassy fields and live oaks.
I think it’s one of the curious things that happened over time in
Christianity that we came to read words about the “spirit” and the “flesh” and
concluded that Jesus was against the human body. Somehow we came to read these
words as “Spirit” is good. “Flesh” is baaaaad.
I think it’s part of the centuries-old struggle for people to
understand Christ’s full humanity and full divinity…which led to a lot of
infighting and accusations of heresy back in the Second Century.
We
keep wanting to rationalize the nature of Jesus with our limited understanding
of the holy in a way that makes sense to us.
One of our earliest church fathers, Irenaeus (eye-reh-NAY-us),
wrangled with those insisting that Christ had to be either a full human or
some ethereal spirit being but he could not be both. Irenaeus
was a firm believer in Jesus being both/and…both fully human and fully
divine…both the eternally begotten Son and a human baby born to Mary (it’s that
collision of opposites again!) For Irenaeus …flesh and spirit were not
separated in Jesus…and they aren’t separated in us.
He said, “Spirits without bodies will never be spiritual men and
women. It is our entire being…that is to say…the soul and the flesh combined by
receiving the Spirit of God that constitutes the spiritual man (or woman).”
God isn’t seeking for us to live apart from our bodies. My
goodness: God became incarnate!
God is seeking to become one with our spirit so we can live
more fully into our deep interconnection to God’s creation. If we live in this
way…there is hope that we will begin seeing the world in a different, less monochrome
way.
Driving between here and Tallahassee, I have been listening to the
Pulitzer-prize winning fiction “The Overstory” by Richard Powers. I am not far
enough into it to give much away, but it is a story involving humans and the
trees.
And as the human affairs go on…the trees are having a much
longer and richer life that the characters are not seeing or understanding.
Powers novel is about how we have become so separated from our
natural environment that we don’t really know anything about it, how the trees
are communicating with each other through their root systems. He says that is
the “root problem” with us…(pun very much intended). We miss so much because we
only comprehend the material things we see without understanding the spiritual
that is taking place under our feet…or in the air moving through the swaying
branches.
Again…I haven’t gotten beyond the opening chapter of the book, but
I sense there will be an awakening in some of the characters to their
connection to the trees that have marked their lives. And perhaps their outlook
will shift as their spirits become awakened to their place in God’s created
order.
Perhaps as we move on from this part of John’s Gospel…(yes, we’re
moving on. We are going back to Mark next week!)…perhaps we’ll contemplate what
it means to be so deeply infused with the Spirit of Christ that we begin to
sense what it means to be transformed by Jesus. Maybe we’ll start to see
ourselves as God’s hands and feet in this world as we meet our neighbors on the
street or at our jobs.
Being Christian in the circumstances and climate we’re in today is
not easy. But we are called to meet the demands and the injustices of the world
in our flesh and blood…and we can do so with a transformed spirit that exudes
peace and love.
Live into the belief that there is a “Perfect Love that casts out
fear.”
This is our hope.
This is our light.
This is our strength.
May this be so and let the church say….
Amen.
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