I can work with that

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14

Ephesians 3:14-21

John 6:1-21

Leftover night

The week before last I was on vacation with my wife’s family.  We have rented the same two houses at the North Carolina shore for the past eight or nine years and every night we all get together at the bigger of the two for dinner.  Meg and I cook dinner one night, and her sister and her husband cook dinner another night, and so on, and it is a very satisfactory arrangement.  Nobody has to do too much cooking, but we can each focus on the one meal we are responsible for, and we all eat very well indeed.  There is just one problem-- we have enough conjugal units, if you pardon the expression, for five nights’ dinners.  But what to do about that sixth night, Friday night? 

The obvious thing to do would be to eat the leftovers and the unused food, of which there is always a lot, and which otherwise has to be transported all the way back home (arriving much the worse for wear) or thrown into the garbage.   Every year we run into this problem and every year someone suggests the obvious solution and every year someone loses their nerve in the end and runs out for pizza or barbeque or something and we end up with even more food than we had before.  Every year, that is, until this one.  This year we finally just emptied the refrigerators and put all the food out on the counters in the big house and rubbed elbows in the kitchen for an hour or so, taking turns at the microwave until everyone was fed.  At the end of which, we congratulated ourselves and asked “why didn’t we do this before?”

Not the right question

Sometimes "Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?" is not the right question.  Jesus knows that it’s not the right question when he asks it of Philip in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, but Philip doesn’t know that, and that’s why Jesus asks it.  And when Philip protests that "Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little," it’s not clear whether he’s contesting the implied premise in the question, that “these people are hungry and it’s up to us to see they get fed,”  or whether he’s pointing out the practical difficulties in carrying it out.  Either way, he’s taken the bait, and he’s stuck.  

Just then up pops Andrew and the boy with the five barley loaves and two fish.  But where did they come from?  Surely Andrew wasn’t going through the crowd, demanding to see people’s food.  He can only have known that the boy has them because he come forward and offered them.  The boy doesn’t look at his five loaves and two fish and ask, as Andrew does, “What are they among so many people?"  He just knows that the people are hungry.  He has a little more food than he needs, and he trusts that Jesus will know how to put his surplus to the best use.

Celebrating what there is

And he’s right.  That kind of trust, that generosity, that simple willingness to respond to a situation of need is something that Jesus can work with.  And what is his work?  It is the work of celebrating what there is, of giving thanks to God for the five loaves and the two fish, and for the generosity of the child who brought them forward.  Jesus gives thanks--eucharistei, as the Greek has it, which is of course where our word “eucharist” comes from, and he breaks the bread and he passes it around to the hungry crowd.

When we gather for the Eucharist, we continue Jesus’ work of celebrating what there is.  We aren’t worrying for the moment about our personal finances.  We aren’t wondering if there will be enough cookies at coffee hour—not yet.  We aren’t thinking about what it’s going to cost to put a new roof on the church.  We are just thankful to God for what is here.  We aren’t anxious because there aren’t 100 people in church this morning, we are thankful for the thirty or forty who are.  We are thankful to be among them, thankful for the gifts that each of them brought to share, thankful for their faith, for their friendship, for the gift of their stories and their prayers and their presence in our lives.  And, of course, we are thankful for Jesus.

New and different bread

When I first came to St. John’s somebody asked me if we could use home-made bread for communion in place of the mass-produced wafers, and I said “sure—why not?”  So we’ve been using it more or less every Sunday since.  There were some people who didn’t like the bread at first, and some who still don’t, which is fine—I understand and respect that.   

And some of those who didn’t like the new bread at first were children— some of them even refused to take it.  But then it began to dawn on these children that actually the new bread tastes pretty good.  And gradually their attitude changed, so that now sometimes when I’m distributing the bread at the altar rail I’ll see them looking at each other’s hands to see who got the bigger piece.  Some of them will even (and I have to confess that my own daughter is one of the worst offenders in this regard), hold out their hands and look up at me imploringly as I’m coming toward them with the bread, and whisper “big piece, big piece.”  And who can really blame them?  Who doesn’t want a big piece of God?  Don’t we all want a big piece of health, a big piece of life, a big piece of peace, and joy, and love?

Only a little piece

But I think spiritual maturity comes when we no longer need to look over at our neighbor’s hand to see how big her piece is.  The Eucharist has a lot to teach us about this.  We don’t complain because we’re only getting a little piece of bread and a little sip of wine, because it is still the body and blood of Christ.  The whole person of Christ, the whole life of the Trinity, the whole incarnation and teaching and death and resurrection and ascension, his whole gift of the Holy Spirit and promise to come again to fulfill God’s loving purpose for creation; it is all present in that little crumb, that tiny sip.  The fact that we go away from the table hungry only tells us that we are now part of the Christ story and it is up to us to go out and help to tell the rest of it.   

In Jesus’ own time it wasn’t always clear that his life was worth much.  Certainly there were some people who didn’t think it was worth anything at all, and in the end it was sold cheap.  But the very heart of Jesus’ teaching to his disciples was that when we start counting the relative value of a life, even of our own, we are lost.  Because life is not something to be priced.  It is not to be hoarded, and it cannot be sold at a profit.  Every life belongs to God, and so each one is of the same ultimate value.  But we can only comprehend life’s true magnificence, the true breadth and length and height and depth of it, when it is given away.  Spent.  Down to the last penny.  Jesus understood this and he spent his life lavishly for the love of this world and we who live in it, and when it was gone it didn’t seem like it had really amounted to much.  Not at first.  Just one young man’s life; one body; some words, a few deeds; a bitter and pointless death.

God can work with that

But history shows that God doesn’t need much.  God says “five loaves and two fish?—I can work with that.  The life and death of Jesus of Nazareth?—I can work with that.  A little piece of bread, a tiny sip of wine, Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter and Philip and Andrew, and Julian of Norwich and Francis of Assisi, and you and me?—I can work with that.  St. John’s Episcopal Church in Petaluma?—sure, why not?  God doesn’t say “why isn’t there more?” or “what am I supposed to do with that?” God says, “thank you.  Thank you for being here.  Thank you for coming forward with what you have.  What tasty looking loaves!  What fresh, tender fish!  Thank you—that will do nicely for all my hungry guests.  

The whole truth

2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

My body conforms pretty closely to the ideal norm of our society: fair-skinned and blue-eyed, male; above average height, on the lean side of average as far as weight is concerned; equipped with all the usual parts, and all of them is reasonably good working order; on the younger side of middle-age; heterosexual.  Much as I might wish to deny it, the fact that I, as a body, conform to this ideal type, makes my life easy.  In ways that I’m not even conscious of, and usually take for granted, my body grants me the social status of a complete person, someone who is entitled to participate, to have a voice, to be taken account of and respected. 

So it sounds almost ludicrous for me to say that even I have moments when I feel that my body has let me down.  An untimely and overly productive sneeze, a cut from my razor that won’t stop bleeding, the effects of illness, injury, or exhaustion, an uncontrolled outburst of anger or grief—there are so many ways that my body can suddenly turn vulnerable, so many ways that the untidiness and unpredictability of being a body can trip me up.  More than anything else in my life it is my body that puts me at risk of feeling like less than a complete person, like an “other”, like someone who doesn’t count and who doesn’t belong.

What I have no experience of at all is being in a body that makes me vulnerable in this way all the time.  I don’t know what it’s like to have “otherness” stamped on my physical body so that I am continually on the outside, always at risk of being ostracized and ashamed, never fully belonging.  But this is a common human experience.  How many of us struggle every day with the body that we have been given, or the body we have become, because it feels like an obstacle to living as the person we know ourselves truly to be?  

The gospel lesson today talks about just such a person, a woman whose body bleeds endlessly.  For twelve years she has endured this hemorrhage, which according to the law code of Leviticus, makes her ritually and socially impure.  For twelve years her body has been an object of disgust and a source of contamination for others.  She has squandered everything she has on doctors, on painful and humiliating treatments, in the hope that someone will be able to bring an end to this nightmare, and yet it has only gotten worse.  Still she hasn’t given up.  One hope remains—she has heard of a traveling man of God, one Jesus of Nazareth, who has the power of healing, and she goes looking for him.

Never mind that when she does find him, he is surrounded by a great crowd of other afflicted persons, each one clamoring for his attention.  Never mind that he is on an urgent errand of mercy on behalf of a rich and important man.  “If I could only touch just his clothes,” she says to herself, “I will be made well.”  She presses forward in the crowd, promiscuously touching other people with her unclean body, not asking permission, not waiting to be noticed, but taking matters quite literally into her own hands. 

What happens next illustrates the other side of the paradox of being in a body.  It is true that our bodies are what mark us off as different from others.  They are what leave us vulnerable to illness and old age, to stigma and violation, and to death.  And at the same time, it is only through our bodies that we can touch and be touched by others.  Our most profound experiences of belonging and connection—holding a newborn child, kissing a lover, eating, drinking, and laughing in the company of friends, stroking the hand of a dying parent, even those moments of solitary contemplation in which we connect with the depth of our own being—all are experiences of the body. 

In the gospel story Jesus doesn’t lay his hands upon the woman to heal her.  He doesn’t say a special prayer to his heavenly Father.  He doesn’t say or do anything.  Nothing happens that anyone else in the large, noisy, fast-moving crowd can see.  But she knows, by a feeling in her body, that the blood has stopped leaking out of her.  And he knows, by a feeling in his body, that healing power has gone out of him into an unknown stranger.  It is his body that heals her, of itself, body speaking to body, through the power of her faith and his wholeness. 

It is an experience that stops him in his tracks and he demands to know her.  He calls her out of the anonymity of the crowd that was her means of approach and her hiding place, and there is no question of not responding.  She prostrates herself before him and she tells him the whole truth.  She tells him the truth of her affliction and her isolation, of the long years of suffering and shame.  She tells him of her body’s desire to be healed, and the hope and determination that led her to him.  She tells him of her journey of salvation from being the object of other people’s loathing to becoming the free subject of her own healing.  And Jesus confirms the truth that she has spoken and sends her on her way in the peace of God.

The whole truth of the body is hard for people to accept.  Those who need things precise and correct don’t know what to do with it.  Many religious people, both in 1^st-century Palestine and in 21^st-century America, approach the mysteries of the body—and the female body in particular—with a mixture of desire and fear and contempt.  That is why they are so obsessed with sexual morality, with maintaining clear and defined separation between the sexes, with keeping women’s bodies under the control of the patriarchal family, religious authority, and the state.   

And yet the Gospels tell again and again these stories of Jesus enjoying social and even bodily intimacy with women, and not just any women, but exactly those women whose bodies are most threatening--foreigners, adulterers, prostitutes, the woman with the hemorrhage, the dead daughter of Jaïrus.  It is as if in Jesus God were fiercely and playful embracing the paradox of embodiment, the whole truth of it, that what opens us to wounding is also what heals us, that what sets us apart from others is also what makes it possible for us to connect. 

This chapter of Mark, with its two intertwined stories of female bodies, echoes the story of Jesus’ own body.  In the bleeding woman, we can see the bleeding Christ, his abandonment, his humiliation, his scourging, but also his invincible desire for healing and peace.  In the events at the house of Jaïrus, we can hear the voice of the angel at the tomb on Easter morning, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has risen, he is not here.”   

These echoes of passion and resurrection remind us that the salvation that comes through Christ is the salvation of our bodies.  It is the freedom to be our true selves, fully expressing the unique individual subjectivity that God has given to every one of us, which includes the characteristics of our bodies.  It is the courage to choose a life connected with others, willing to touch and be touched, with respect and compassion for all beings that share this embodied life with us.  It is the discipline of giving ourselves to acts of concrete solidarity with those whose bodies’ just demands are denied.   It is life in the promise that even death does not negate the hope of the body, but is like the planting of a seed that bears the abundant fruit of new and fuller life , glorified life, life that is, in some fashion that we cannot conceive of with our human limitations, life in a body.

Satan up close and personal

1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15
Psalm 138
 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

Yesterday I decided not to help someone.  It was nobody I knew—a man who had called the church and gotten a number for pastoral emergencies from our recorded telephone greeting.  He told me that he’d called fifty churches and that I was the first person to call him back.  He was asking for more than I usually give, two nights in a motel, and it would have been more than usually inconvenient for me personally to do it.  That was a factor, I admit.  But he was single male.  From the way he described his situation, it sounded like he’d survive.  And you can’t say “yes” to everyone, not if there’s going to be money in the discretionary fund when an even more pressing need arises.   I didn’t judge him as unworthy of help.  I didn’t feel justified in what I did.  But I did tell him that I had decided not to help him, and that I was sorry, which I was.  A few minutes later I got a text message calling me a “false prophet” and a “dog.”

Dom Helder Cámara, a Roman Catholic bishop in Brazil in the 1960s and ‘70s, famously said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."  This is what happens in unjust social systems.  People turn against each other.  I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the lonely man in need of shelter and the Brazilian ruling class.  I’m not putting myself in the same league as Helder Cámara, equating courageous obedience to God’s commands concerning the poor with lame rationalizations for shirking them.  I’m just noticing something common in our experience, that place where inequalities of wealth and power, and the work of being present to them, gets us called names. 

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has been going around Galilee, preaching in the synagogues about the kingdom of God, about how close it is, about the shift in consciousness that brings people into it.  He has been healing and casting out demons on his own charismatic authority.  And he has been making provocative connections between the sicknesses he cures and the social and religious conditions in Galilee, between paralysis and debt, between hunger and Sabbath laws, between leprosy and priestly codes of purity.  The tension between Jesus and the established authorities is mounting and they send some scribes down from Jerusalem, Public Information Officers, to issue grave warnings that Jesus is a black magician.  He may have authority over the unclean spirits, but don’t be fooled.  He is in league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons.   This is the secret source of his power.

Jesus responds to this accusation in a remarkable way.  He doesn’t deny the charges.  He doesn’t accuse his accuser in return.  Instead he joins with the premise and plays with it.  “If I am using the power of evil to drive out evil,” he says, “then that’s really a good thing, is it not?  Because if the devil is divided against himself, he is like a kingdom at war with itself, or a house divided.  And that means that his power is at an end.”  Speaking this way, Jesus not only disarms the fear and hatred which the scribe’s words were meant to arouse against him.  At the same time, he turns the attention of his listeners away from the imaginary bogeyman Beelzebub, and toward the real danger that hangs over their lives.  For, even though he is having fun with the silliness of the scribes’ slander, he is not making light of evil.  Jesus, in his teasing way, directs our attention toward the real spirit of evil in the world, the one who works by making accusations, demonizing enemies, dividing kingdoms and houses and people against themselves, and bringing all down to ruin together.

Jesus then goes on to say something even more surprising.  “But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” I think it is safe to say that Jesus is not advocating burglary.  The strong man must be Satan, and the property that should be plundered from his house is us, the human beings on every side of a divided kingdom.  It is all of us who are captive to the spirit of inequality, and division, and insult, and Jesus seriously intends to set us all free. 

But to do that you need to get your hands dirty.  You need to lay yourself open to the charge of being a criminal, to take the place of a robber, as Jesus will do on the cross.  You can’t bind the strong man without getting very close to him, “up close and personal” as the saying goes.  The other day in traffic with my family we saw a bumper sticker that read, “God bless our troops, especially our snipers.”  Well, that approach doesn’t work with Satan.  You can’t snipe at him from a distance.  You can’t blow him up from 7,000 miles away with a pilotless drone.

In the last year or so I have been approached at one time or another by organizers for four different groups who are trying to bring together faith communities to build grassroots power for social change.  Of course they want me to get involved, or more precisely, to get me to get you to get involved, and I have to explain to them that we are still in this start-up situation and have our hands full just getting our own fallen house in order.  But it is intriguing to me that at a time when churches and synagogues are shrinking and closing their doors, and younger people are staying away in droves, and nobody in the society at large seems very interested in what we have to say, someone should be knocking on our doors looking to us for leadership to save the day.   Maybe these organizers didn’t get the memo about the decline of the church.  Or maybe there’s something else going on.

At the end of today’s gospel lesson Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters come to the door looking for him.  They’ve become uncomfortable with all the attention he’s been getting, and the signs of trouble brewing.  They’re worried about him, and are trying to get him to come back home and return to his senses.  But when Jesus hears that they are outside, he looks around at the people who are sitting with him and says "Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Here is an alternative to the society in which inequality sets people to blaming and cursing each other.  Here is a vision of a single human family in which all are united in the freedom of obedience to no one but God.  Maybe the organizers want to talk to us because, however imperfectly our communities of faith realize this vision, as segregated as we may still be by divisions of class and language and ethnicity, as haltingly as we may practice the ethical obligations that are the natural working out of this vision, at least we keep the vision alive.  At least we know that this is what our life together is supposed to be like, and that we are in need of repentance and forgiveness when it is not. 

And if binding the strong man, the spirit of inequality and bigotry and hatred, really demands that we get personally involved, maybe the organizers understand that only the power of the Spirit can give people the courage, and the stamina, and the capacity for bearing the truth, to stick with the work of liberation all the way to the end.  Only people who know that the key to the new age that the world is literally dying to enter is a complete change of heart will steer clear of grandiose fantasies of power, and the seductions of self-righteousness.  Maybe the new politics that the world needs really do start here, where we can take the risks, and make the mistakes, and learn the lessons of loving one another across our divisions, because we have been loved and because we have been forgiven.

You didn't have to be there

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 104: 25-35,37
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Of the 50 to 60 million inhabitants of the Roman Empire, a tiny elite, perhaps one-half of one percent, owned some 80 percent of the wealth.  Nearly every scrap of writing that remains to us from those days, the novels, the poetry, the plays, the works of history and philosophy and rhetoric, was written by members of that elite.  It was written for members of that elite.  It speaks from their worldview.  It addresses their concerns.  We have a pretty good idea from the surviving literature about how the one-half of one percent lived, what they ate, how they spent their time.   We know many of their names. 

Contrast this with the peasants, the small shopkeepers, the artisans and laborers, the miners and sailors and soldiers and slaves who made up the remaining ninety-nine and one-half percent of the Empire’s population.  They didn’t write books, and the people who did write them were not really interested in their lives.  Their names aren’t carved on stones in the ruins of ancient cities.  We know next to nothing about them, so that when a distinguished historian recently published a book describing what we can say about them from the available evidence, he gave it the title Invisible Romans.

But there is one work of ancient literature  that is by members of the ninety-nine and one-half percent.  This book, really a collection of books, is about ordinary people.  Thanks to these writings we know some of their names, some details about how they lived, and what they cared about.  We know about them because certain experiences that they had were so significant that they decided everyone should know about them.  They organized themselves into resilient and mobile little groups, dedicated to giving testimony to what they had witnessed.  Eventually these testimonies were written down, so that they could be carried from place to place and passed down through the years in something like their original form.  Stories by ordinary people, about ordinary people, intended, by and large, for ordinary people, that by one of history’s great miracles have come down to us.

I am talking, of course, about the New Testament.  And today, on this day of Pentecost, we whose very existence as a people called “Christians” is owed to those ordinary people, celebrate the miracle that gave us birth.  This miracle has two parts.  The first part is the way in which Jesus’ disciples discovered that they were now responsible for his mission.  Not only responsible, but willing and able and empowered by God to carry it out.  That is the transformation that we celebrate in the fifty days after Easter—that this little  group of ordinary, invisible people made the journey from running away in fear on the night of Jesus’ arrest to bravely carrying on the work that he started. 

The second part of the miracle is that when these people stood up to talk about God’s mighty acts of liberation, redeeming the whole world through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, people actually listened.  Some of them actually got it—as improbable as this message was, as unlikely as the messengers were, it got through to them in a completely surprising way. 

You’ve probably had the experience where you are trying to tell your spouse or a friend about something that happened to you earlier in the day that was particularly affecting, or hilariously funny, something that for whatever reason you really want to share with another person.  So you try to describe it with all the significant details, and then you get to the climax, the moment that had the real emotional impact, and the person you’re talking to just kind of looks at you with a blank expression.  Maybe they force a little laugh just to be nice, and say something like “wow—sounds pretty funny,” or “that must have been really cool,” but you know that they just didn’t “get it” in the way that you hoped you would.  So you say “I guess you had to be there.”   

Well the miraculous thing about Pentecost is that these ordinary people, Simon Peter, for instance, Son of Jonah, started talking about extraordinary things, amazing, mysterious, mystical experiences of what they had learned from Jesus and how he came to them after he died, and breathed his peace into them and sent them out on a mission of healing and forgiveness to the whole world; and you know, it turned out that you didn’t have to be there.  You didn’t have to be there to believe that what these people were saying about Jesus was true.  You didn’t have to be there to feel like this was the best news you’d heard in a long time, maybe ever, and that it was meant for you. 

You didn’t have to be there to feel like someone was speaking to what you’d always secretly suspected about God and about yourself, but never dared to let yourself believe— that God loves you and everyone else in this world like a Father or a Mother, and that you aren’t an invisible person at all, but are heaven’s messenger, gifted with a high and noble purpose.  And just because you hadn’t been there didn’t mean you were left out of that purpose—it was not too late to join, and everyone was welcome, no matter if you were an important person or not, no matter what background you came from, there was a place for you in the brother- and sister-hood of the Messiah Jesus.

The apostles looked at these miracles, the way they had come to accept the mission of Jesus for their own, and the way all different kinds of people were actually taken with their message, and they knew that only God could do this.   That’s what God the Holy Spirit does, she communicates.  She connects.  She enters into the space between people and removes the barriers to love and trust and truth.  That’s why we invoke the Holy Spirit whenever we perform a sacramental act.   We know that only God can make the bread and wine really communicate the living body of the Lord to us.  Only God can really make the baptismal water go all the way in, and cleanse us inside and out for new life in Christ.  Only God can really make two people married, one flesh as Christ and the church are one.  So we ask God the Holy Spirit to come, and the message of Pentecost that she is not ashamed to be here, no matter how ordinary the company.  The church was created and is most alive today when it includes all kinds of people, and embraces all kinds of differences among them.

Take Brandon and Briana, and their baby Dallas, who are being baptized here today.  They are ordinary people.  Briana’s nineteen, and Brandon just graduated from High School last week.  They are not married.  It is not certain whether they ever will be.  And yet they come here today, as they have been coming for the last year or so, seeking God’s blessing for their family and their lives.  They could go a lot of places to hear people tell them where they’ve gone wrong or what they should be doing differently, but in the grace of the Holy Spirit we say to them here, “What an adorable baby!”  They could go a lot of places to hear that they’d be welcome just as soon as they got married.   In the grace of the H0ly Spirit we say, “You have to make your own decisions, but remember—with God nothing is impossible. What can we do to help?” 

Mainly we’re just grateful that they’ve decided to throw their lot in with Jesus.  They are exactly the kind of people he chose carry on his mission in the world.  Just look at us!  You didn’t have to be there.  You don’t have to have it all together.  You don’t have to be one of the one-half of one percent.  You just need faith in the Holy Spirit within you, who called you into this work and is giving you the gifts to carry it out.  And you need faith in the Holy Spirit outside you who is hidden in the world, ready, waiting, eager to respond to what you have to say.