Pentecost 12

Sermon for Hope Episcopal Church
The Reverend Martha Frances
Year B, Pentecost 12, Proper 16
27 August 2006

Text: John 6: 60-69

Other Readings: Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-25; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 5:21-33

Joshua said to all the people whom he had led into Canaan after 40 years in the wilderness with Moses, “. . . choose this day whom you will serve,. . . but as for me & my household, we will serve the Lord.” With these words & the Israelites’ answers, they all renewed their covenant with Yhwh, the God of the patriarchs. A recurring theme in the Hebrew Bible is Yhwh God’s covenant with the Hebrew people then renewed in successive generations.

A covenant is a solemn binding agreement freely entered into by 2 or more parties, typically including terms, oaths, & some sort of ritual such as a sacrifice, a meal, an exchange of tokens, or even a handshake. Obviously, the Hebrews have had a hard time sticking to the earlier covenant that Moses made with Yhwh, so Joshua challenges them to turn away from the old gods, including those worshiped by the conquered people whose lands they have taken. At one point, he insists they aren’t capable of serving Yhwh because they won’t forsake the old gods. They jump to the bait & respond, “No, we WILL serve Yhwh.” Can’t you just imagine Yhwh sighing & saying, “Wonder how long they’ll keep up their part of the bargain this time!”?

Today’s psalm reminds us just how close God is to God’s people: the eyes of God watch over the righteous, God’s face confronts those who do evil, God hears the call of the faithful & is near to the brokenhearted. The promise of the psalm is that God will deliver the faithful from their troubles & will ransom his servants’ lives. We might say, “What kind of fool would renege on such a deal? God promises so much, & so little is required of us.” We all know, however, how difficult it can be for us to fulfill what is required of us.

Such a dilemma confronted the disciples—& confronts us—in today’s gospel. Last week, we explored Jesus’ command that the disciples must eat his flesh & drink his blood if they want eternal life. Jesus makes a strong case for being part of the Christian community who share the Lord’s Supper together as the surest sign of our unity with him. I tried to make an equally strong case last week that we form & strengthen community best when we come frequently to the communion table & receive the body & blood of Jesus which he has given for us. However, Jesus doesn’t tell us that all our problems will be solved magically by our taking communion each week. If that were true, we wouldn’t be able to fit all the communicants in this nave.

The hard saying that Jesus hears the disciples grumbling about is his insistence that he is the life-giving revelation from God & will return to God’s right hand. The Jewish people are unhinged when Jesus claims to be the Son of God which they consider arrogant. Much like the Hebrews from old, many of the 1^st century Jewish people can’t get past their unbending tradition & their own insistence that God cannot appear in human form, providing the salvation for which they yearn. They have been looking for a prophet, but Jesus comes as Messiah, the Son of God. They have been looking for a military rescuer, but he comes as the Prince of Peace. For many, this is simply too great a challenge to their long-held beliefs.

Jesus has offered them a choice, a turning point in their lives, sort of like the covenant which Joshua had offered their ancestors long before. Jesus wants to covenant with them, & the ritual to affirm that commitment is eating his body & drinking his blood. Many turn away because they cannot trust this new way of believing. Jesus’ ministry has been very popular up until now, & crowds have come to him to see & receive his sign & wonders, but now he’s just asking too much. Furthermore, he’s not behaving the way they expect the Messiah to act.

Jesus tells them that the Son of Man must ascend to God & that the Spirit who comes gives life. The Greek word for the life that the Spirit offers is “zoe” which doesn’t mean life’s duration like just living a long time but means joyful & abundant life, life that matters enough that you want to live it. Jesus offers a quality of life through the Spirit which surpasses just putting in more than average years.

Can you imagine the despair & disappointment Jesus feels when he asks the 12, “Do you also wish to go away?” So many have turned away from the Covenant that God grants them all through Jesus. So many have refused to act out of a belief that all they must do is love God with all their heart, soul, & mind & love their neighbor as themselves.

Peter, who often answers for all the disciples, responds, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe & know that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter actually says, “Where else do we have to turn, Jesus? We’ve thrown in our lot with you, & we don’t have a Plan B.” But you know what? That’s enough. Peter has accepted the condition of belief that the New Covenant requires. And he has spoken for the 12.

Jesus calls us to believe also, & to continue to grow in that belief. He asks us to make a choice, to turn around, to love God with all our heart & soul & mind. How do we show that love? We love our neighbors as ourselves. We fulfill our part of the bargain, not alone, but in the Christian community. What is the ritual, the process we go through?

Most Christians become part of the faith community through the sacrament of baptism. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptizer, & ever since Jesus initiated the rite, it has been the way we become Christians. We will have baptisms some Sunday this fall in case you want to be included or for your child to be baptized. Please check with me so we can schedule the baptismal preparation class.

If you’ve already been baptized, even as an infant, you don’t need to be baptized again. Regardless of how you considered it then or what you’ve done since, God did it just right the first time. If you are now ready to respond to the gift & grace of baptism which Christ offers you, the way to become a member of the Episcopal Church is by the sacramental rite of Confirmation. Confirmation is the mature sacrament by which you accept your baptismal responsibility of living as an adult Christian. Although the Bishop will not return to Hope for Confirmation until 2007, it would be a great opportunity for you to let me know now in order to better structure our classes. Of course, those who have already been confirmed may ask us to request your membership be transferred.

How do we continue to grow in our walk with Christ? Well, that’s why we have a Christian community? Has it ever dawned on you that, if God needed the community of the Father, Son, & Holy Spirit, that we need a community, too? We aren’t created to live alone. We’re supposed to develop our faith in a Christian community where we can praise God together & learn from & strengthen each other. We have the awesome & amazing opportunity to break the bread & drink the wine, being strengthened by Christ’s own flesh & blood. The Holy Eucharist is the ritual through which we renew our covenant with God through Christ often. By pouring over God’s Word & taking his body & blood into us, we learn in the community to fashion our lives after the life & mind of Christ.

The passage from Ephesians we read today is an example of an ancient household code taken over by the early Christian Church communities to help Christians live faithfully together. I’ll bet you thought I was going to ignore the scripture for wives to be subject to their husbands as they are to the Lord. Oh, no, this is too good a chance to clear up some misconceptions about that passage! The book of Ephesians was written to teach new Christians, especially the Gentiles, how to behave in a world in which they were very much the minority. Why do you think they needed this baptismal instruction? Of course, because they were very easily influenced by the behavior of the larger community around them, they needed some guidelines for Christ-centered behavior.

Most people don’t read far enough in this passage. The way some men use this passage to justify abuse of their wives is certainly not the Good News of Christ. Notice that the comparison is that wives should be as reverent toward their husbands as the church is reverent toward Christ. Now we all know the church—that’s you & me, all of us together—certainly fails to be properly subject to Christ from time to time. But this is the goal to strive for.

In addition, husbands are supposed to love their wives just as Christ loved the Church. Wow, now that’s a remarkable statement! You men are supposed to treat your wives with as much respect & awe & reverence as Christ nurtures the Church. Who lives up to that instruction? Well, we’re talking about the ideal here, but what I notice is this relationship between husband & wife is supposed to be mutual & reciprocal. Just in case you men don’t get the point with the 1^st comparison, the writer offers another: husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. Now the author of Ephesians didn’t know anything about our modern tendency to put ourselves down. He assumes that we accept & respect our own bodies as glorious gifts created by a loving God. We should treat ourselves & our spouses with mutual respect & care. How do we learn to treat others with such care & respect? We do it together in a body which we call the body of Christ, nourished by Christ’s very body & blood of the Eucharist. We don’t understand this totally, for the writer tells us it is a mystery. Just because something is a mystery doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to learn what we can about it; it just means we’ll never fully understand a mystery. We Christians are called to treat our closest human relationships with just as much honor & love as we know how, allowing our association in the community to help us learn how to grow in that love & respect.

Now I’ve just touched on the tip of the iceberg of what it means to live as a Christian within a community of faith, but I pray you’ve been intrigued enough by these scriptures & my thoughts on them that you desire to respond to God’s invitation to a covenant relationship in a deeper way today than ever before. May each of us commit to Christ’s journey anew today. Perhaps you will covenant with Christ one concrete action you will take toward a deeper faith relationship now & in the future.

Pentecost 11

Sermon for Hope Episcopal Church
The Reverend Martha Frances
Year B, Pentecost 11, Proper 15

20 August 2006

Text: John 6: 53-59
Other Readings: Proverbs 9: 1-6; Psalm 34: 9-14; Ephesians 5: 15-20

When I was a little girl, we traveled from wherever we lived to my mother’s family home for Thanksgiving. Leaving after school on Wednesday, we drove until far into the night, but when we left Ft. Worth, my sister & I started watching the eastern skyline ahead of us for the illuminated figure of Pegasus atop the Magnolia building in downtown “Big D.” We each wanted to be first to see Dallas, & Dad was always relieved that we quit asking him “How much further?”

Then came the Thanksgiving feast. As you might guess, the women in my family have always been good cooks. They left nothing off the menu for Thanksgiving: turkey & cornbread dressing, candied yams & green beans & jello salad, & more desserts than could go on one table. As the oldest grandchild, I was the first of my generation allowed to eat at the “big people table” in the dining room, taking great pleasure in bragging to my cousins. Various relatives came from afar; I’ll never forget the year the St. Louis aunts graced our table. Family stories were almost as exciting as the food at holiday meals. At that table, I first heard my great-grandmother recall the train ride to Dallas from Missouri with my own grandmother & great aunt when she was befriended by the famous outlaw Frank James!

We all have tales of special meals, don’t we? Perhaps your favorite was your 5^th birthday, or like another of mine, my granddaughter Amelia’s first one. One of the lynchpins of our ministry at Lord of the Streets is the Sunday morning breakfast after the Eucharist—a hot breakfast for 250 or so homeless people served to them at table where they can fellowship with one another. For many homeless, Sunday breakfast is their one meal each week served at table—festive in itself.

Hospitality is a basic Jewish as well as Christian value, & our lesson from Proverbs today presents Lady Wisdom as a hostess preparing meat & drink & setting her table. Then from atop the town hall, she invites the poor—the common people—to feast with her. She offers, “Come, eat of my bread & drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, & life, & walk in the way of insight.” Even Abraham killed the fatted calf to provide for the strangers at his tent. Sharing a festive meal is at the heart of developing community. None of us should be surprised that the primary repeatable sacrament of the Christian Church is a sacred meal. Each Sunday we make Eucharist together around the altar table, preparing & offering the bread & wine of Holy Communion for all to receive.

The 6^th chapter of John which has been our gospel text for the past several weeks shows Jesus personalizing the celebratory meal, shocking the Jewish community by telling them when they consume the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, they actually eat his flesh & drink his blood. The Jewish people to whom Jesus spoke must have been scandalized when he said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man & drink his blood, you have no life in you.” After all, ever since Moses, they had drained the blood from their meat before cooking it. That they were actually to drink the wine Jesus claimed was his blood must have been hard to swallow, literally!

But our eating of the body & drinking the blood of Christ in a sacred meal is exactly the point, Jesus is saying. The power of Jesus’ incarnation is that Jesus actually came to earth as a human being, fully human as well as fully divine, to live among us earthlings, to invite us to fulfill our lives as God created us to do, as God’s children—brothers & sisters of each other as well as of Jesus. Jesus says here that his flesh is true food & his blood is true drink, so those who consume this sacred meal abide in him.

What does it mean, to “abide” with Jesus? To abide is to trust without wavering, not having to have reassurance. And the marvelous gift which Jesus offers is that he abides with those of us who eat & drink at this table. Jesus Christ, the ruler of the universe, lives within those of us who commune with him & each other. How extraordinary! How enriching, once we wrap our minds around that wonderful gift which Jesus offers.

How long has it been since you have really meditated on the idea that Jesus wants to hang out with us, even those of us who aren’t bigwigs in the world? Who did Jesus hang out with during his earthly lifetime? Yes, he got to know some important people like Nicodemus, but most of the time, he hung with fishermen & tax collectors & people whom he healed from paralysis & leprosy & other diseases which made the “nice” people avoid them. Jesus told those who criticized the quality of his friends that those who are well have no need of a doctor. Jesus sat down & told stories with common folk like you & me.

You know what else? Jesus still wants to hang out with us. Jesus told his disciples, near the end of his life according to John’s gospel again, that one reason he had to die was so the comforter, the Holy Spirit, could come & be with them but also be with those precious to Jesus far beyond his earthly lifetime. And because we are physical human beings who need to see & hear & touch & taste, Jesus provided an astounding ritual which is at the same time very ordinary, & he told us to perform this ritual every time we could. So we come to this altar table every Sunday & on Wednesday evenings in this beautiful worship space to commune with Jesus & with each other.

Of course, I respect the wishes of parents who prefer for their children to wait until they are older to receive the Eucharist. I prefer, however, that children never remember a time when they were not fed at Jesus’ table. Just as they do not have to understand the digestive system to be fed earthly food, there is also true grace in their being nurtured spiritually as soon as they are baptized. Baptism is full initiation into the body of Christ for all of us, no exceptions.

The ordinariness is that we’re eating a meal together, a festive meal just like the Thanksgivings I remember from my childhood. What’s absolutely amazing is that somehow, in ways none of us fully understand, Jesus is present in this meal, so present that we can taste & see Christ’s goodness as we eat the bread & drink the wine. In the Episcopal Church, we don’t have to explain HOW Jesus gets into the bread & wine. We call the method a mystery, content with believing that since Jesus tells us whoever eats him abides in him, we don’t have to explain the mystery.

Jesus’ Jewish ancestors had presented fruit & vegetable & animal sacrifices to God in their worship, but Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross effectively fulfilled the sacrificial system. Christians have always believed that Jesus made the one holy & living sacrifice & that we are called to make only a sacrifice of praise & thanksgiving here at the altar in order to intermingle with Jesus & have Christ live in us. We’re called to eat & drink with Jesus so we may go forth from here transformed people to live as new creations in the world & to invite others to this marvelous feast & the way of life it typifies.

Some have misused this scripture to indicate that Jesus separates us into the saved & unsaved, but Jesus performed the ultimate sacrifice for ALL of us & invites us ALL to the table. We may choose to respond to the invitation or not to respond, but Jesus hasn’t left any of us behind; God’s love doesn’t have limits. A lot is made in some circles of the importance of each person’s accepting Jesus Christ as his or her personal Lord and Savior. Some individuals & churches are pretty intent on giving us the formula for that salvation event & then hint or proclaim outright that their chosen method is the only way. What arrogance to limit the God of the Universe to only one set formula or experience!

Barbara Crafton in her on-line meditation this week helped me in verbalizing the short-sightedness of such an approach. She says, “I may engage a personal shopper or a personal trainer or a personal assistant, but I don’t have a personal savior. I have the same one everyone else has, & I have him by virtue of having been created through him. My salvation is my return to him, from the midst of the worst muck-ups into which I can stumble. It is not my reward for good behavior or for having the right answer when someone asked me a question about him.” Certainly, our ever-growing & maturing relationship with God through Jesus Christ is a life-long journey we travel in concert with a community of faith, & our personal prayer & meditation time allows us access to the on-going process of sanctification, but Jesus offers & even urges us all to respond to an inclusive invitation.

How many of us, at sometime in our lives, at least, hold back our response because we’re scared of what kind of new creation Jesus expects us to be? What would it mean if you really let go & gave yourself fully to Christ? How would your life have to change, not in order to earn Christ’s salvation—that’s already been won for you. All you have to do is accept it, nourish yourself with Christ’s gift of body & blood, & ACT redeemed.

Perhaps we’re just a little afraid of who we’ll become if we get fully infected with this Jesus bug. Lady Wisdom tells us to lay aside immaturity & live, walking in the way of insight. Many avoid growing into maturity as Christians so they don’t have to take responsibility for living as grown-up Christians.

Grown-ups need regular nourishment, & this sacramental table offers us the best—Jesus’ body & blood. When we come to the banquet table, we risk continual conversion, for that is what it is. Those of us who have thrown in our lot with Jesus must be vulnerable enough to listen in our hearts to what Christ would have us do with our lives. Regardless of where you are on this Christian journey, as you receive Christ’s Holy Communion this day & from now on, may you experience the deep & abiding love Jesus has for you, just the way you are. May you also hear Jesus’ call to take a chance on him, to commit to grow into the person Jesus created you to be. May we all risk becoming the community which fulfills God’s hope for us.