Sermon

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for September 2nd, 2018

Published on by Tina Shippey

Detail of a page from the Book of Kells (c. 800)

Proper 17
15th Sunday after Pentecost
September 2nd, 2018

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9
Psalm 15
James 1:17-27
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Click here to access these readings.

Sometimes our lectionary works really well.  Sometimes we come to church, hear the readings, and you can see so easily how they connect.  Sometimes, though, that’s not the case, and the readings seem like a Broadway play I once saw; it was a variety play, with all these different pieces with different songs and different sets and costumes.  But when I saw it I didn’t know it was a variety play; I thought there was a story.  And so with each new scene I was scratching my head, thinking, “What in the world is this about?”  I did my best to create some semblance of a plot, and, for a while, I had one, and it was pretty compelling; but then at intermission, when I told my dad all of this, he just shook his head.  “There’s no plot, Tim,” he said.  “It’s just disconnected pieces.  That’s part of the fun.”  Sometimes the lectionary selections are like that.  Sometimes life is like that.

But not today, not this morning.  This morning the lectionary works well.  All the readings fit together.  The Bible, you see, is full of many different themes: there’s hope, perseverance, dedication, struggle, even sorrow and frustration, but so too death and resurrection.  All these themes run through the Bible, criss-crossing back and forth, weaving in and out of one another.  And you can see these themes in some of the study Bibles around.  John had one the other day, and in the margin on all the pages are little references to other passages in the Bible that are quoted, or mentioned, or referenced.  Medieval artists tried to represent this tapestry-like nature of the Bible in the margins of their manuscripts, with all their mingled designs of animals, people, and geometric shapes.  One job of the lectionary, and one of our jobs when we study the Bible inside or outside of church, is to take one of these pieces or threads and pull it out, look at it, and figure out how God is speaking a word to us in all these different parts of the Bible.

And this morning’s theme is about…well, it’s about freedom.  And that might seem strange.  For all these readings, in a way, are about rules and laws, what to do and what not to do.  In Deuteronomy, we hear of statutes and ordinances.  In the Psalm, we hear about keeping your word and swearing to do no wrong: “Whoever does these things, [these rules], shall never be overthrown.”  In the letter of St. James, we hear of more things to do, and even in our gospel, we hear of Jesus Christ talking about practices, rules, and defilement.  But even so, I believe all these readings are about freedom.

And what is freedom?  Well, my atheist friends would say that freedom is the ability to do anything you want, to choose your own fate.  They chafe at God because they don’t want someone telling them what to do, how to live, and what is good and what’s bad.  They want the freedom from that sort of authority figure.  I don’t agree with their image of God, but even so: they want a freedom from something.

Or perhaps freedom is like when teenagers go off to college.  Now, they’re not only (supposedly) free from something (free from parents, they way things have been, etc.), but free to do things.  They’re free to stay up however late they want, go to whatever parties they want, and goof off, as they want.  And even if they choose not to goof off, and they sit and study, that is a choice they are free to make.

Now, these are certainly two different types of freedom.  But the freedom that Jesus is talking about, and the freedom that we encounter in these readings this morning, is a little different.  Elsewhere, Jesus said, “you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32).  And we may rightly wonder, like those who were around him, what is this freedom that Jesus is talking about?  And in Psalm 119, we hear “I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought your precepts.”  And we may question, “How am I free if I am bound by precepts, bound by laws?”  We get closer to what I’m talking about in 2 Timothy.  Here we hear, “for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7).  For where the spirit is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17), and that spirit is of power, and love, and self-discipline.

This freedom we hear of in the Bible is not just a freedom from something, or a freedom to do something, but a freedom in something.  Think, for a moment, of baseball.  There are rules, certainly: After three outs, the teams switch being at bat or in the field.  When running to a base, you have to stay in the narrow, little baseline.  And these rules are pretty strict.  But when you’re playing the game, those rules fade into the background.  Not that they disappear, but that they become the very foundation of the game, the ground you walk on and the air you breathe.  And something happens when you “play by the rules”, or, rather, when you’re “in” the game.  You hear athletes talk about it every now and again, for there’s a glory in the game, of breathing the air of the rules of baseball that is a freedom.  There is a glory in the crack of the bat, in the lights, in the smell of the glove, even in the dust that you kick up.  And this glory, this freedom, isn’t from something, or the ability to do something; it’s a freedom in baseball, a freedom in and through and up beyond and with the game that jostles the heart from its slumber and makes it alive again.

This is the sort of freedom that Jesus and the Bible are talking about.  For Jesus didn’t come just to give us stuff to do so that we wouldn’t goof off all the time.  Jesus came to save us from sin and death, not so that we could get back to the status quo.  No, for Jesus freed us to something, to a life in God, to a life lived along a path of freedom.  And this freedom may look at first like a lot of rules, a lot of words that so often can seem empty and rote, a lot of prayers we really don’t want to say so early in the morning or so late at night.  But when we enter into them, when we live those prayers, and these liturgies, when we walk up to the communion rail not thinking about doing everything right but because we love Jesus and here is a way to meet him, when we see that the water in this font isn’t just liquid but the very light of salvation, then…then we see that this life is a holy life.  We see that this life is a good life.  And that little path, that narrow gate, opens up to a great landscape, burgeoning with life and love.  This is the path that Christ calls us to live; this is the freedom that that path calls us to.

 

Fr. Tim’s Sermon for August 26th

Published on by Tina Shippey

Proper 16
14th Sunday of Pentecost
August 26th, 2018

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Psalm 34:15-22
Ephesians6:10-20
John 6:59-69
Click here to access these readings

There’s a book I’ve always loved called Sirens of Titan, by an author named Kurt Vonnegut.  Now, Vonnegut writes a lot of satire, and I read the book back in high school when I was all nice and innocent, so maybe I missed the point, but, I’ve always thought Sirens of Titan to be a really beautiful book.  It’s a good old sci-fi story, about space travel and different worlds, but at the center are these two characters, a man and a woman.  And at the beginning of the book, they’re told that they will fall in love with one another.  And they are disgusted with the idea.  One of them is this rough and tumble kind of guy, and the other is a woman of high society.  They couldn’t be more different, they know their differences, and they can’t fathom that they would ever love each other.

But, you know, something changes throughout the story.  Something changes – slowly -about these two characters. They go through a lot as they’re traveling to different worlds.  They encounter different creatures and fantastic sights that are more than they could have ever imagined.  And these sights, these experiences chip away at them, dig into them, and change them.  Not all at once, but ever so slowly, so that when the two finally meet again at the end, they do fall in love.  It’s not an epic love, not some great romantic love with sweeping music like in Hollywood.  But it’s a gentle, steady, even love, a sort of love that you, or at least I, could believe in.

Now, we don’t hear much about this sort of love in our gospel reading this morning – at least, not yet.  First we hear of its opposite..  One of my commentary books says that this is a pretty anticlimactic ending to all this talk of bread and blood and life – but I think it’s more of a tragedy.  Now, this is one of the central moments of John’s gospel.  Here, Jesus reveals something very important about himself, that he is that bread that came down from heaven.  He reveals that he is the bread of life, that his flesh and blood are the salvation of the world.  This is a revelation much like the transfiguration, where we see God’s glory and God’s hope for this world shining through the cracks, when we can catch a glimpse of God’s love and joy.

And we Christians, two thousand years after it happened, love this scene.  We read it and think of Christ’s presence in our lives.  We hear it, and we think of how Christ enriches us, nurtures us, saves us, when all is darkness.  We hear in these readings a hint of the Eucharist, the center of our worship here every Sunday, that great feast to which we are called and which is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.

But not folks in Jesus’s day.  When they heard it, they shook their heads and said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”  They heard this message that fills us with hope, and they turn back and no longer went about with him.”  And this isn’t because they were confused, or stumped, or that this teaching wasn’t really for them.  They didn’t come to this difficult teaching as we might come to learning Biblical Greek, or hiking the Comida de Santiago, things that might take a great deal of effort but which we know we can accomplish with a bit of willpower and prayer.  No, these disciples turn back and no longer went along with him.  This is it for them.  They’re through.

We should not, perhaps, be too hard on these men and women.  Folks of Jesus’s day might have been taken aback with the idea of eating human flesh and drinking blood.  And we should be, too, in a way.  There’s a certain audacity to Jesus’s words here.  He’s trying to break down people’s assumptions, and he’s trying to get inside their hearts, which always takes a bit of pushing – and some people just don’t like that.  They think he’s messing with tradition too much, messing with the Law, when what Jesus is really trying to do is show them the beating heart of that same tradition and that same Law.  And, in the end, they see Jesus as just another wandering teacher, just another human being, not the Son of God.  Who is he, they wonder, to make such fantastic claims?  And so they hear this teaching, and turn back.

In the gospels, Jesus faces some rather dark times.  After his baptism, he is driven out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  In the garden of Gethsemane, he falls to the ground and prays, “Lord, take this cup from me; but not my will, but yours.”  That’s a tough prayer.  And, of course, there is his trial, the road to Calvary, and the bloody crucifixion.  Jesus was no stranger to darkness.

And here we find him in similar darkness: that moment when he reveals part of his being is the moment, and the reason, that Jesus is abandoned.  He’s left alone because of who he is.  And when the dust settles, and the twelve disciples are all that’s left, you can almost hear the pain in his voice when he asks, “Do you also wish to go away?”

And Peter’s response to Jesus is important, for it shows in him a great love.  He says, “Lord, we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  Now these short few words – “come to believe” – they are important here.  There’s a story to those words; there’s a history to them.  There are hard, long days beneath the sun in those words, and there are long nights awake struggling with Jesus’s words, his ministry, and with his very being.  Peter’s words aren’t from someone with just some passing understanding of Jesus, but from someone who has walked continually with Jesus, day in and day out, whose ear was always open and eager, even if he did not understand fully.  They come from a man who pondered those words, wrestled with them, leaned his whole being into them to see not just what they meant, but the greater reality of hope and love that they lead to.  These are tired words, but they are strong words as well.

And isn’t this how it is in our own lives with Christ?  Sometimes we have flashes of insight, surely, what people call “eureka” or “ah ha!” moments.  Sometimes God gives us sight and we take in, in one great draught, the light of God.  But more often, I think, at least with me, we approach God in steps.  We walk with God, pray with him, talk with him, go to him in our frustrations, our anger, our sorrows, and each time we find that we’re leaning on God more and more.  Our faith is something we “come to”, something we gather from our experiences of God on the road of life.  And eventually, hopefully, it is also something we even “know” from trusting God more and more.  Our life in Christ, and our trust in him, is something that gets deeper and deeper each and every day, until that last day when we are finally welcomed home.