Sharing God in abundance

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

Our vestry, the Board of Directors of our church, has been studying a book about the changes in religious attitudes and cultural patterns that have fewer and fewer people interested in what they think the churches have to offer.  At our meeting the other night, we were sharing stories and observations around the table about these changes as we experience them in our own neighborhoods and families, and one member of the vestry talked about a conversation with her daughter who said to her “why would I go to church?  I don’t need to go to some building to find God—to me God is everywhere.”  And she’s right, of course—God is everywhere, available to everyone, all of the time.   

During our long centuries of cultural dominance the message of the church to the world has been an accusation: “we have God and you don’t.”  The reply of the church to that daughter of the vestry member would have been, “no—the God you experience for yourself and relate to any time you want is not the real God.  It’s probably the Devil.  Our panels of experts decide what is, and is not, allowable religious experience.”  People who said publicly that you don’t need the church to find God, but that God is everywhere, all the time, for any one were considered dangerous.  They were excommunicated and persecuted and even burned for saying it.

But, thankfully, fewer and fewer people are willing to accept that anymore.  Today people recognize that nothing could be more preposterous than the notion that God is a scarce commodity.  Nowadays, anyone can rent an auditorium in an office park and call themselves the Divine Light Worship Center, and set up a light show and a pop band and an espresso cart in the lobby.  Today, you can browse at your leisure in an overstocked spiritual emporium, filling your cart with this Buddhist meditation and that Native American symbol, and it’s all good.  You can choose what seems to suit your sensibility and lifestyle and leave the rest behind.

This approach to religion mirrors the individualism of our culture, and our growing social fragmentation.  Because the unspoken corollary to “I find God on my own—however, wherever and whenever I want to,” is “you go have your God and leave me alone to have mine.”  I’m not going to tell you that this is wrong.  But I can say with conviction that it is not biblical.  The Bible is full of descriptions of sublime personal encounters with God.  One thinks of Abraham hearing the call to leave the land of his fathers and set out on a great journey, of Moses turning aside from the path to see a bush that burns without being consumed, or Saul of Tarsus struck blind by a great light on the road to Damascus.  But in every case, the import of these experiences is not individual but collective. 

Outside of a few of the Psalms, the Bible has very little interest in private religious experiences of personal illumination and consolation.  But it is very interested in experiences of conversion that turn a person into a leader, who summons others to share God’s vision of a transformed community.  The great and fundamental confession of the biblical faith is not “I have my God, now you get yours”, but “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.” 

This is the God of Jesus.  God sent Jesus to be a leader, to connect people across barriers of isolation and bring them into a new communion with God and with each other.  His mission was not to accuse the world—“I have God and you don’t”—but to ask it a question: “What could happen if we shared God together?”   [Repeat].  He put that question to those who had been pushed out to the margins and excluded from the sphere of blessing and holiness, and he put it to the elites who guarded the places of access to sacred power.  Jesus didn’t demand that people submit to his authority.  But he did ask them to imagine how they would be different if they could see the authority of God already here, present among us now, inviting all of us together to create in God a community of justice and love, of sharing and forgiveness. 

Jesus didn’t just talk about these things.  He showed people what it looks like by sharing with them at the most basic level.  Anyone who has carried a lunch tray through a crowded high school cafeteria, anxiously looking for a place to sit, knows the role that sharing a table plays in defining social rank and belonging.   But Jesus subverted the conventional norms about all that by eating with anyone.  It was one of the things that drove his critics crazy about him—“This man welcomes tax collectors and sinners,” they said, “and he eats with them.”

 I see this aspect of Jesus’ ministry in the background of the Gospel stories about the feeding of a great crowd.  I think the real miracle in these stories is not the multiplication of bread and fish.  It is that 5,000 individuals, each one of whom had come looking for Jesus out of his or her own need, jostling against each other, vying to be the first to get his attention—this crowd sat down together on the grass and shared a common meal; at least for a moment, they became a community.

They shared the miracle of the abundance of God, that not only is available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, but is also what makes it possible for us to get over our fear and suspicion and rivalry with one another and live together in unity and peace.  It was a powerful shared experience for those 5,000 people, and I think that when the church is at its best it gives people that kind of experience.  It’s something you can’t have by yourself: an experience of belonging, of being part of something, part of a people that are on a journey together toward a common homeland where they won’t exploit and oppress and deceive and slander, and commit violence against each other anymore.  It’s an experience that changes the way people see themselves in relation to the existing power structures in world.  Which is something the Gospel clearly understands—why else would it say that after the banquet the crowd tried to seize Jesus and make him their king?

He wouldn’t let them do it, but not because his leadership was “spiritual” and not political, but because they’d misunderstood what he had just showed them about the way power works in the Kingdom of God.   Because you can’t point to any one place in the story and say, “here is where the five loaves and two fish became enough to feed a multitude.” Was it when the little boy came forward with his little bit of food?  Was it when Jesus took it and said the prayer of thanksgiving?  Was it when he broke the bread and passed it out to the crowd?  Was it when they received it, and handed it around? 

This isn’t a story of Jesus showing off his power, so people will become dependent on and submissive to him.  It’s an illustration of what can happen when we trust enough to share the blessings of God together; God, the Letter to the Ephesians says, “whose power working in us can do abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine.”  This is the divine power that we worship, and put at the center of our common life as Christians.  It is the power that makes the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ.   But where is the transformation—in the bread and wine or in the people who eat and drink them?  And when does it happen?  When the priest says the Eucharistic Prayer?  When the little bell rings?  When the bread is broken to be shared?  When it’s given out, or when we receive in our hands, or in our mouths?

It’s a mystery.  Difficult to comprehend, even harder to communicate, especially to someone who hasn’t been there, and has no idea what it’s about.  And yet this is the power that can disarm the forces of human self-destruction and save the world.  So I don’t think we really have a choice except to try to share it.  At least we know now what’s not going work—“We have God and you don’t.”  So let’s get up, and dust ourselves off and try again, this time with a question, Jesus’ question: “What could happen if we shared God together?”  I say we make more of an effort to ask that question, explicitly and implicitly, with words and with actions.  Let’s ask it of ourselves, and of our neighbors and our old enemies.  Let’s ask it with as much courage and creativity as we can muster, and let’s see.

The Good, the Bad, and the Meaningful

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119:97-104
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8

Not long ago I was driving my daughter home at the end of the day and I had the news playing on the car radio.  And I was just turning onto our street when Risa asked me from the back seat, “Daddy, why is the news always bad?  Why do they always talk about wars and people shooting each other and things like that?  Why don’t they ever have news about the good things that people do?”  Well, there were a lot of different ways I could have answered.  I could have given her a dose of cynicism about the media.  Or I could have said something jaded about human nature, and the fascination that violence and catastrophe seem to hold for us.   But she’s nine years old.  So what I did was to agree with her that it just doesn’t seem right that the news is always bad.  I said I thought she was right that there must be a different way to talk about what’s going on in the world, that there must be more to the story. 

Some of us at St. John’s have been taking part this year in a program of reading the Bible from cover to cover.  And along with this so-called “Bible Challenge” I’ve been reading books about the Bible, and also leading courses of study at the church on especially important pieces of the Bible.  So I’ve been reflecting on the Bible in recent months even more than I usually do.  And this week as I was reading the lectionary texts for this morning, and remembering that conversation with Risa about the news, it struck me that things haven’t really changed all that much since the Bible was written.  People often fault the scriptures because they contain so much violence and catastrophe and terror.  But it doesn’t seem to occur to them that this is still what the world is like, and it wasn’t any different in Bible times.  In some ways, it was worse.

The other thing we sometimes forget is that when the Bible was written there was nothing else in print.  The Bible was not shelved in a specialized section of the bookstore labeled “Inspirational.”  And there was no idea at that time of a dimension of human experience called “spirituality” or “religion,” that only had to do with lofty, uplifting, and comforting subjects.   In fact the Bible speaks out again and again against the notion that religion is somehow unconcerned with all the ugly and disturbing things that people think and do.  What the people who wrote the Bible said is that there is one world of human experience and knowledge, and the whole thing, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, belongs to God.

 Which sounds kind of reassuring until you start to think about all the stuff that happens, and what that says about God.  And the prophets and sages of ancient Israel knew they had to think about it.  They had to make room in their understanding of God’s sovereignty and holiness, for the bad news.  Their experience of God’s goodness and faithfulness had to allow somehow for the arrogance and greed of the rich and powerful, and the sufferings of the poor, for apostasy and injustice, and the devastation of their land by invading empires, and the wholesale slaughter of their people.  And when you read the Bible you start to see that they didn’t give themselves an easy out.  If you go to it looking for a simple explanation for why the world is the way it is, or a straightforward solution to its problems, you will be disappointed.  They are not there.

What you will find is a record of the thoughts and words and deeds of men and women seized by a profound awareness of God, an awareness that comes to bear on every aspect of human experience, from the most exalted states of religious vision, or worldly triumph, or erotic love, to the depths of physical agony, emotional abandonment, terror and despair.   It’s not always easy for us to see the value of this kind of faith.  We are powerfully conditioned by the modern mind, which only wants to allow meaning to that which can be explained.  But the truth is that most of our experience, and in particular that part that affects us most deeply, is inexplicable. 

We will never know why that particular sunset was different from all the others, or why we’ve never forgotten that particular meal.  We will never understand exactly why we fell in love with that person out of all the men and women in the world, or why that child came to be ours, or why we got sick, or that one had to die, or why people make such foolish choices, or rise up with murder in their hearts.  But the faith of the Bible is that in spite of the limits of our comprehension, everything that happens, every that is, every last bit of it, down to the hairs on your head, means something to God.

So when we talk, as we have been doing this month during our Stewardship Season, about the abundance that we share as a faith community, we might consider this: our greatest gift may be that here, in a world where wonder and reverence are melting away under the hot wind of shallow explanations, is a place where there is always more to the story.  St. John’s is like a little wilderness preserve, where we keep alive the possibility that everything means more than we know.  And the way we do this is we pray.  Praying is where we meet the limits of our understanding of why things happen the way they do, and we go beyond them into God. 

Prayer is more than asking God to solve our problems.  It is also asking God to make meaning of things that are beyond our comprehension.  That goes for the good things as well as the bad.  Every day we receive blessings that we did not obtain for ourselves and can’t say with assurance we deserve.  When we make prayers of thanksgiving we stop sleepwalking numbly through the miracle that is our lives.  Giving thanks, we make even the most ordinary day a journey of discovery, the discovery of meaning. 

And as for the bad news, the personal struggles and the mass suffering, to pray about it is to stop explaining it away.  It is to acknowledge that it affects us deeply, and is more than we can handle by ourselves.  We could come up with explanations, but they wouldn’t really satisfy.  And knowing that, in itself, is the first step toward taking responsibility.  I don’t mean so much “responsibility” as in “guilt.” Or as in, “it’s up to us to fix it.”  I mean respons-ability just like the word says—the ability to respond. 

Prayer is empowering, because it says that we are able to respond to what happens, no matter how incomprehensible it is, because we know the world is God’s.  That’s what gives us the confidence and the mandate to keep praying for peace in a nation in a state of endless war, to keep praying for healing, though the doctor says it is hopeless, to keep praying for justice when inequality and corruption are on the rise. 

It is this knowledge that world is God’s, that keeps us praying for the safety and dignity of women and girls, that keeps us praying for the survival of species, for sight for the blind, and liberty for the captives, and good news for the poor, and for the resurrection of the dead, and the coming of the Kingdom.  Sometimes it doesn’t seem like enough just to pray, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.  And I like to think that persistence in prayer makes it more likely, and maybe it happens more than we care to admit, that we will, from time-to-time, hear an answering voice in our hearts that says, “okay—here’s what we can do.”      

Enough is enough

Lamentations 1:1-6
Lamentations 3:19-26
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

It is with a great sense of relief that I can stand here before you this morning and say “soccer season is almost over.”  Not that I haven’t enjoyed taking my daughter to the practices and watching the games, or that I’m not proud of her and of her teammates for the hard work they have put in and the improvement they have made over the last couple of months.  But it has been a big commitment of my time.  For some reason it has worked out that all of the practices and most of the games have been on evenings when my wife works, so it has mostly fallen to me to be the chauffeur and the cheerleader.   There have been days when Meg has dropped Risa off at my office at 4:00, where she’s watched TV on the computer until 5:00, at which time I’ve helped her get into her soccer gear and delivered her to the practice field at 5:30, gone home to make a salad, picked up a pizza, returned to get Risa at 6:30, swung by for the baby sitter, dropped the two of them off at home, stuffed some pizza in my mouth and returned here to the church for a two-hour vestry meeting at 7 o’clock.  I’m sure many of you know what that’s like.

So when you and I wish we had more faith and a stronger relationship with God, when we imagine our lives more abundant with the grace of Christ, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we want our names recorded in the church’s calendar of saints.  We’re not necessarily asking to be missionaries or martyrs, or miracle-workers, or leaders of great movements of religious renewal.  We might just be asking for the faith to get through soccer season.  We might be praying for the faith to get through the loss of a job, or the death of a parent, or a diagnosis of cancer.  Maybe we did start out with dreams of a doing something really important and impressive for God, and instead we found that the ordinary trials of life ask us for more faith than we think we’ve got, and we wish we had more.

When the disciples of Jesus him to increase their faith, the Gospel of Luke doesn’t tell us exactly why, but from the answer Jesus gives them, you can guess that they want to be more like him.  They want something like his spiritual greatness, or at least his miracle-working power, and they think that the reason why they don’t have it is that they don’t have enough faith.  This attitude is still common today.  The world is full of people who say, “if only I had more faith,” meaning “if only I believed in God harder,” or “if only I had more positive thoughts,” or “if only I wasn’t so afraid;” and then you can complete the sentence with any number of counter-factual results—“I wouldn’t have gotten sick,” or “I could have changed my ex-husband” or “I would have the glamorous, successful life I was supposed to have.”

Now this may seem kind of insensitive, and go against the grain of our habit of taking everything that Jesus said extremely seriously at face value, but Jesus turns this idea of what faith is into a joke.  If anyone in this room found that they suddenly the faith to obtain their heart’s desire, would he or she really use it for something as silly and pointless as uprooting a mulberry tree and planting it in the ocean?  Again, for Jesus, the notion that if we only had more faith we could be something that we are not, and make our should-haves, and would-haves, and could-haves come true, is a joke. 

But at the same time Jesus says something important about faith—something positive.  And to illustrate his point he refers to his old friend the mustard seed.   Now there can’t be a lot of faith in something as tiny and insignificant as a little round mustard seed.  But a little teensy-weensy amount of faith is all it needs.  All it needs is enough faith to sprout.  And then God goes to work.  God gives rain and dew for the moisture it needs.  God gives the soil to anchor its roots and feed it with nutrients.  God gives it sunshine and carbon-dioxide from the air so its little leaves can make food.   And the mustard seedling has the faith to receive what God gives, not trying to be something that it’s not, but just growing, a little more every day, until somehow, miraculously, that tiny mustard seed becomes a large shrub, twice the height of a man, in a single season.

We imagine from reading the Gospels that Jesus could do anything.  Maybe he could have uprooted a mulberry tree and planted it in the ocean—if he’d wanted to.  But we don’t really know, because although he did do amazing things like walk across the stormy lake and feed five thousand people with a few loaves and a few fish, he only did those things because that was what God wanted him to do in that moment.  He never did them to promote himself or to test the limits of his power.  He did them to show the greatness of God, and to help people. 

Faith is the radical act of surrendering one’s life to the will and the purpose of God, and with faith we can do incredible things, because it is God who does them.   And just a little faith is enough, because what God gives is enough.  Instead of asking why God didn’t give her something bigger and better, the faithful person says, “thank you.”   “Thank you, God, for your gifts.  Now—how can I use these gifts to serve you?”

The fall Stewardship Season begins today at St. John’s, and the theme we’ve chosen for this year’s program is “Sharing in Abundance.”  This is taken from a passage in 2^nd Corinthians where Paul urges the church at Corinth to have faith that God is able to provide them with abundant blessings.  What that means in practical terms is that each of them can trust that they will have enough, not only for their own needs, but that they will also be able to share in the good works that all of them are doing together.  This passage, like the gospel today, speaks to the truth that, to be really happy, to have full human lives we need something more than the bare necessities of survival.  And we need something more than to accumulate a surplus in the form of money in the bank and closets full of clothes and garages stuffed with knick-knacks and toys. 

We have a need, not a passing whim, but a core spiritual need, to be of service.  We need to have a share, a part to play, in doing something good, something good that’s bigger than we could do by ourselves.  So when we talk about “abundance” in connection with Christian stewardship, what we are saying first of all is that we are committed to being a community that serves, that seeks to be faithful to the will and purpose of God and to gather together the gifts we have received and put them to work for the good of others.  And we are also saying that every one of us is blessed with enough to contribute something important to that work.   We may not end up revered as martyrs of the faith.  We may not be called on to spend our very life’s blood in God’s service.  And maybe we will.  But in any case, God is able to give us enough, and more than enough, to make a difference.