Taking Scripture Seriously

I wasn't sure where I was going to be headed with this sermon. I was having a tough time figuring out how to start and how to deal with a pericope that sounds just like the Gospel reading from the week before that...and will be remarkably similar to the one for next week. Thankfully, I will be taking a break next Sunday, so I won't be preaching. But still...how to talk about Jesus when he says, "I am the living bread." 

Fortunately, a decision to attend the funeral of a devoted priest...the cleric who started St. Barnabas Episcopal Church...gave me a beginning. And then things flowed from there. 

See what you think. 

Text: John 6: 35, 41-51

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This past Friday…I attended the funeral for the Rev. Canon Bob Carter…whose photo hangs out in the narthex.

As many of you know…he was the first and founding vicar of our beloved St. Barnabas Episcopal Church.

I never knew Rev. Carter…but I learned a lot about him during the funeral service.

As a seminarian…and then as a priest…he was described as a man of “unfailing faith.”

As the Canon to the Ordinary for two bishops…Bishops Shipps and then Louttit…and serving as the examining chaplain in church history for the diocese…he helped shepherd and form many of the new priests…a role that requires a lot of listening and loving.

It also requires a real rootedness in faith…and turning to God for guidance and strength…truly unfailing faithful.

I sensed that the Rev. Carter was one who did feast on the living bread of Jesus…and that his soul was never thirsty.

And I’m not just talking about someone who received Eucharist regularly…which he did.

I’m talking about a man who was a voracious reader.

I heard he had a room in his house that was stacked almost to the ceiling with books.

Father Carter’s quest for knowledge…and devotion to prayer…gave him the type of nourishment that we hear Jesus talking about in the Gospel lesson this morning from John.

A metaphorical type of bread…not a literal one.

I admit…I’m always a little baffled when a person says to me that they take the Bible literally.

Often when a person asks me if I believe that the Bible is the literal word of God…I do what I do when confronted with that sort of question.

I ask another question…. not to be evasive or cagey.

But because behind a question such as that is often a belief…and I want to know what that belief is so I might better understand the real question.

And what I usually find is either a person who has been told by others to believe that the Bible was literally God’s hand put to paper writing down all the words of Scripture….or it’s someone who doesn’t trust clergy people.

Maybe even it’s a little bit of both.

And I’m honest in saying that I don’t take the Bible literally…but I do take Scripture seriously.

I believe our Biblical ancestors of the Old Testament were people touched and moved by the Holy.

These are women and men who could see and sense that Spirit…the Sophia…that moved over the waters of chaos as described in Genesis….and that spirit gave them guidance…and strength and courage to overcome obstacles…see the beauty in creation….and ultimately follow the twisty-topsy-turvy path of faith.

That path would continue and come to a place where Jesus enters the world to announce to all…

”the kingdom of God is right now…put away the distractions and come back to God.” (paraphrase Mark 4)

Be in right relationship with God…which will bring you into right relationship with your neighbors….the ones you like and don’t like…and all of creation.

The Scriptures contain timeless messages for us as we grapple with the things in our day-to-day lives.

That’s what I mean by taking the Bible seriously.

But like those folks who are the biblical literalists of today…we hear that some of those listening to Jesus back then couldn’t wrap their minds around his bread metaphor.

They start to rattle off his lineage…who his daddy is and how they know his mama is Mary.

These complaints are like the ones we heard a few weeks ago…when Jesus was unable to do any healing works in his hometown. The grumblers take his metaphor so literally that they have missed the point of what he’s been saying.

It’s not that he’s “bread” in the same sense as the five barley loaves from the feeding of the five thousand.

But this “bread” is about who he is…the words he speaks…the things he teaches…the way he treats people and heals the sick.

These are the ways to be in right relationship with God.

He’s the type of bread that goes into the head and heart not the stomach.

I was listening to Rose Duncan…the Canon for Worship at Washington National Cathedral…as she meditated on this particular passage.

She noted that Jesus isn’t being critical of the manna in the wilderness that the ancestors ate.

But what he’s doing is inserting himself…his ethic…into a living context...and offering that if the people would listen to him…and lean into this love that he’s promoting…they will have the type of food that will sustain them in a more profound way….

…Especially as trouble arises.

That’s the key here.

We always need to remember that our evangelists…Matthew…Mark…Luke…and John…are writing about and putting Jesus into the context of a time when the believers in Jesus were not in the majority.

They were the outcasts and lived in a system that was set up to favor some and not others.

In other words…the conditions of their time…while not exactly the same as the issues we face in the 21^st century…they have some of the same hallmarks.

Similar stresses.

The kind of hardships that some of us might recognize and resonant with.

And Jesus…then and now…is trying to teach us the basics of how to remain strong…resilient and wise to the attempts of those who want to divide us.

The feeding he did with the loaves and the fishes was an example of how out of something small…big things can happen.

He demonstrated that there is plenty of Love to go around if and when we are willing to share it.

And yet…there are still those who resist this teaching.

That rather than accept this abundance…they want to live in a place of fear and scarcity.

Something else Canon Duncan mentioned was the line about those who are “drawn to the Father” …”drawn to God.”

That verb…when we look at it in the Greek---helkō---is the same verb John uses to talk about the big net of fish that the disciples have to “drag” ashore.

So let’s think about this for a moment.

Instead of hearing in this line…God “drawing” people in like a moth to a flame….what we’re talking about is God “dragging” them to God’s self…as they wiggle and struggle and resist…like fish in a soaking wet net.

That’s a pretty accurate description of what the faith journey can feel like.

No matter how much we hear that we are loved…

no matter how much we sing hymns and songs that speak about the depth of God’s love for us….

…we seem to resist it.

Or we think we must do something to deserve that Love…when the truth is that God loved us first through the life…ministry…death…resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

The good news is that God will never give up on us.

God will keep drawing…dragging…yanking on us…

Chipping away at our hardened exteriors and working to open our hearts to accept this gift of Love so that we pass it on to others.

Sharing love is so necessary for our city…state…and country right now.

In the words of the great theologian Burt Bacharach, “What the world needs now is Love sweet Love.”

We who feed on the words of Jesus…we who come to the table to receive the bread and wine…the body and blood of Jesus…we who believe in the teachings of this rabbi with a radical vision of love…we have it within us to meet the needs of our neighbors. Right now. So let’s go!

In the name of our one holy and undivided Trinity.

 

Prophets and Gifts

The 50th annivesary of the "Irregular Ordinations" in Philadelphia came and went on July 29th. For me, and the many thousand of women clergy in the Episcopal Church, this was a big deal. What those eleven women (and then the Washington Four in 1975) went through was hell. Their bravery challenged the institution of the church. That's no small undertaking. 

And the more I think about what they did, the more I see it as a prophetic act. 

So I give thanks for the Revs. Carter Heyward, Allison Cheek, Merrill Bitner, Alla Bozarth-Campbell, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeannette Piccard, Betty Bone-Schiess, Nancy Wittig, Emily Hewitt, and Katrina Swanson for stepping up to be the firsts. 

Text: 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a

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Last Sunday… a few of us sat here in the nave and watched the film “The Philadelphia Eleven.”

It’s a documentary that tells the story of the eleven women who were Episcopal deacons that felt called to be priests in the church.

But in 1974…The Episcopal Church hadn’t come to a consensus on allowing women to be priests.

Only four years earlier…the first group of women delegates were seated at the General Convention.

They made the case for women’s ordination and came very close to getting it passed. But when women tried to press the issue again at the 1973 convention…there was tremendous push back.

And so the women deacons met.

They developed a strategy.

They had the support of some male bishops…the vice-president of the Episcopal House of Deputies…and the rector of the historically black Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.

And on July 29^th 19-74…50 years ago…they defied the rules of the Episcopal Church and were ordained as priests.

While not exactly speaking truth to power with words…these women did speak truth to power with action.

It wasn’t easy.

They received death threats…hate mail…and harassment.

In many cases they weren’t allowed to function as priests.

And…even though the church came around in 1976 to approving the ordination of women…the Episcopal Church still allowed bishops to deny women a path to the priesthood…under what was called the “conscience clause.”

As a result…many women would have to relocate to another geographic region just to follow their call and hope to find a bishop who would be favorable to allowing them to be priests.

An almost identical scenario would play out later with the ordination of LGBTQ priests.

We’ve come a long way since 19-74…both as a church and as a society.

But it doesn’t happen without those willing to stand up…speak up…shake things up…and call out the sins of those in authority when necessary.

It takes being willing to be a Nathan approaching a King David.

Nathan didn’t have an easy task.

We need only look at what happened to John the Baptist when he chastised Herod to know that those who enjoy having power over people will not take kindly to those who challenge their actions.

I can only imagine what must have been going on in Nathan’s head.

In the same way that an earthly powerful King David sends people off to war…and command the presence of a woman in his court.

God as a source of power is telling Nathan…”Go tell King David…you ain’t right!’

Now…Nathan has to contrive a way to break this news to David.

And he comes up with a plan… a very pastoral plan.

Nathan tells the wayward king a parable.  

Parables are useful tools.

Jesus spoke in parables to his followers as way of helping them understand the presence of God in ways that they could comprehend…allowing them to think for themselves.

Because each of us has the ability…with our God-given wisdom…to weigh what is right and what is wrong.

What is good versus what is evil.

And this parable of the rich man taking the poor man’s only and most beloved lamb to slaughter worked!

As Walter Brueggemann notes about this situation…David rightly understood the parable.

But he was too blind to understand how it spoke to his own wrongdoing. His guilty conscience betrayed him.

 He so quickly blusters about how this rich man in the story…” deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

“A-ha!” says Nathan! The king is busted!

David will get punished.

Nathan’s mouth opens and he pours out the words of God…laying out for David all that is about to come upon him.

The once favored will lose the child Bathsheba is carrying. His house is going to be divided…and his wives will be given to others.

I can only imagine what that must have been for Nathan to stand there and speak those words to his king.

I imagine it took quite a bit of courage to stand up to one who could easily have ordered him struck down right there on the spot.

But this is the role of a prophet.

They’re the ones who listen deeply to the Spirit…to the Wisdom of God…and even with knees knocking…voices trembling…butterflies beating their wings furiously in their stomachs…they speak the truth to the powerful.

They do so despite the risk to their lives…because the words in their mouths are not theirs but the spirit of God that is upon them.

I find that Episcopalians tend to be shy about thinking that there are still prophets of this kind in our world today.

That whole idea of God speaking through people in the way  our Biblical ancestors understood it may seem just a little too “woo-woo” for our more enlightened minds.

And yet we can still point to people who have spoken truth to power and who do it from a place grounded in the Gospel.

The late South African archbishop Desmond Tutu led the fight against apartheid.

The late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whose campaign for Black civil rights in this country was not limited just to black people…but the liberation of working-class whites who struggled against the invisible caste system in our own country that keeps millions living in poverty.

And today…that mantle of speaking up for justice for those who are living paycheck to paycheck can be seen in the efforts of the Poor People’s Campaign led by Bishop William Barber and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. (thee-o-HAHR-ess)

And then there are those eleven women in Philadelphia in 1974…followed by four more women in Washington, D.C. in 1975…and their supporters the Reverends Paul Washington, William Wendt and Peter Beebe who stood with them in the breech to insist that the Episcopal Church do as it has promised to do…to trust in the Holy Spirit to guide it into all truths as Jesus said would happen…if we are humble enough and willing enough to listen and follow.

Not everyone is meant to be a prophet…we get that from our reading from the letter to the Ephesians.

But all of us have gifts…all of us have abilities…and we are all called to bring what we have into practice for the purpose of spreading more love into the world.

A love that sustains people and grows community…not chaos. 

The spirit of the Lord is upon each of us now to do the work we are given to do.

Love God…and love our neighbors as ourselves.

In the name of the one Holy and Undivided Trinity.