On the Word God Is Speaking; a sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

^{John 6:56-69}

⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. ⁵⁷ As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. ” ⁵⁹ Jesus said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

⁶⁰ Many of his disciples who heard this said, “ This message is harsh. Who can hear it? ”

⁶¹ Jesus knew that the disciples were grumbling about this and he said to them, “ Does this offend you? ⁶² What if you were to see the Human One u going up where he was before? ⁶³ The Spirit is the one who gives life and the flesh doesn’t help at all. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. ⁶⁴ Yet some of you don’t believe. ” Jesus knew from the beginning who wouldn’t believe and the one who would betray him. ⁶⁵ He said, “ For this reason I said to you that none can come to me unless the Father enables them to do so. ” ⁶⁶ At this, many of his disciples turned away and no longer accompanied him.

⁶⁷ Jesus asked the Twelve, “ Do you also want to leave? ”

⁶⁸ Simon Peter answered, “ Lord, where would we go? You have the words of eternal life. ⁶⁹ We believe and know that you are God’s holy one. ”

Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

Are y’all tired of hearing about bread?

The last time I went through this series of texts in John, I preached the entire five weeks on Holy Communion, and we broke bread every week.

Some of you are glad I didn’t do that. Some of you wish we had.

Yeah, me too.

On the other hand, some of you probably haven’t realized that’s been happening.

<sigh>

Well, this week is the last, and John is finally shifting out of this obsessive conversation and talking about spirit and life instead of bread, and when they’re not hearing what they want to hear any more, the crowd disperses.

Good thing that doesn’t happen in our churches today. We would never come to church to feel comfortable and good about ourselves.

That Jesus’ words are spirit and life doesn’t mean, after all, that they are always - or even often - a pat on the back or a nice warm hug. If that’s your impression, I encourage you to read the gospels again. Take Jesus’ message seriously, and see just how comfortable and warm and fuzzy it makes you feel.

The funny thing is that the crowds are reacting to something we generally take for granted today: that body-and-blood argument, that life comes only from Christ. We may not take the time to think about it much today, but we take it for granted. We generally get that what Jesus is saying here reflects the modern phrase, “You are what you eat.” How much we take Jesus in - how much of his teaching and his model and his very life we ingest - is directly proportional to the degree we become like him and become remade into the image of God.

And I’m going to differentiate again here. We are talking about the living word of Christ, and I don’t just say out of redundancy. It’s not just because Jesus says, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” I’m saying that because the word Jesus says here isn’t the word John uses to describe Jesus when he opens his narrative. This isn’t the λογος of creation. Jesus is referring to the words he is breathing, the present, Spirit-inspired ρημα that is proclamation, announcement, immediate and vital right here and right now.

And that is the same word that Paul is using. Truth as your belt; righteousness, more well-known as justice, to protect your soft, gushy bits; “shoes on your feet so that you are ready to spread the good news of peace”; faith or trust as your shield; God’s saving power to protect your brain; and the sword of the Spirit, God’s word.

The sword of the Spirit. The sword that is the very breath of God. That πνευμα that inspires us, fills our lungs with good news. That Spirit is the still-speaking word of God.

Next time you read this bit - and I know it’s a popular paragraph - remember that. The word of God Paul is talking about, that Jesus is talking about, isn’t that handy reference text that some of you bring to worship. The word of God is more alive, more vibrant, more present than that. The word of God is…

Noah told me the other day that God didn’t talk to him.

I told him, basically, that he needed to learn to listen.

The question caught me off guard. I tried to offer him the hope that everyone can hear God, that we just have to learn how. But when all the stories he hears are of people who seem to be physically receiving the sound of God’s voice vibrating the air around them, how do I tell him that God almost never does that? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means listening carefully for the words of hope and grace from our neighbor? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means observing or receiving a gesture of mercy, even if no word is spoken? That hearing God’s voice sometimes means sitting on the bank of a creek and watching the wonder of nature changing and reshaping herself?

How do I tell him that God is everywhere, if we only learn to look?

We have to experience that. We have to still ourselves, to calm the plethora of other voices in our heads and around us, to focus in on where blessing and redemption are.

The word of God is being spoken all around us. No book can contain it. No church or idea can restrain God’s ability to speak Spirit everywhere we turn.

Solomon, in his wisdom, began to understand that the temple he built would never really be a resting place for God. It was only ever an homage, a gift to recognize how good God had been to him.

But how could God possibly live on earth? If heaven, even the highest heaven, can’t contain you, how can this temple that I’ve built contain you?

Oh, I say this to you all the time. We try so hard to fit God in a box, to conform the Holy Spirit to our own ideology, our own ethical system. And we’re in plentiful company to do so. Our own scriptures are full, chock full of people who tried very hard to fit God into a box. And occasionally we have a wonderfully redemptive story of someone whose conception of God got stretched when the epiphany came that God was much, much bigger than what they thought.

Solomon understands that.

The crowds following Jesus began to understand that. But instead of bowing in wonder and awe, they thought it was too much for them right then, and they left.

The word God proclaims threatens to change us. It threatens to transform us at a fundamental level, and it is just as threatening to those who have never tried to be in relationship with Christ as it is to those who were baptized decades ago and have spent all our lives trying to live into that relationship. Because the righteousness of God is so incredibly distant from our human experience! It is an ideal we can never reach; it is infinitely far away.

The spoken, still-spoken word of God is dangerous and uncomfortable. God is guiding the Church, which is not a building or a structure or a denomination, but rather is everyone who would be in relationship with Christ; God is guiding that Church into strange and new places, into ideas that don’t jive with what we are often willing to accept in our fervent religiosity.

And God is guiding us there not to wage battle with people, but to nurture them, to love them into relationship with Jesus.

Because the word of God isn’t a weapon of war; it’s a proclamation of peace.

We spend a lot of our conversation thinking that Paul is telling us to wage war with people who don’t represent what we expect of God’s will. But that’s an impoverished interpretation of Paul’s words.

Paul is being far more straightforward than that, I think. He specifically, concretely says:

We aren’t fighting against human enemies

but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens. 

So let’s set aside our bitter, belligerent words that we reserve for our “enemies” and try speaking the word, the ρημα of God instead. A word that is peace, that is hope, that is love for each other. A word that is spirit and truth. A word that is praise of God, thankfulness and blessing. A word that is only threatening because of how powerful it is and how different it is from the human word.

Let us surrender our human words. Let us let God speak a word through us, and all our words shall be like the psalmist:

How lovely is your dwelling place,

LORD of heavenly forces!

Better is a single day in your courtyards

than a thousand days anywhere else!

My heart and my body

will rejoice out loud to the living God!

LORD of heavenly forces,

those who trust in you are truly happy!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Beginning of Wisdom; a sermon for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:51-58

⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

⁵² Then the Jews debated among themselves, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “I assure you, unless you eat the flesh of the Human One and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁵⁵ My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. ⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them. ⁵⁷ As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me lives because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. It isn’t like the bread your ancestors ate, and then they died. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

The Psalmist reminds us today that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

. “Fear of the LORD is where wisdom begins”

.

That’s a little hard to read in a Christian context, knowing that God, the Three in One, three Persons in relationship as one God, calls us to relationship with Godself, to know the Parent personally, to know Jesus as friend, to be deeply and wholly inspired by the Spirit.

How do we fear someone who calls us to be so intimate?

I mean, this is the same God who says,

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.

You don’t get much more intimate than that.

So what’s with the fear?

Does it feel like I’m nitpicking? Maybe I am, but it’s important to make an attempt to straighten out this stuff in our heads so that all the ideas that are thrown at us about God and the way God does things don’t keep slamming into each other and fighting against each other. It’s one thing to talk all our contradictory ideas about God with our neighbors who all think the way we think. But the world outside the Church thinks more critically, and we need to either have these ideas straightened out in our heads, to be able to say that this idea is right and this idea is wrong; or we need to be able to have a serious (grace-filled!) conversation about why we believe that God is one way and another.

So yeah, maybe I’m nitpicking. I’m nitpicking because I want us to be faithful, functional disciples.

Because that’s why we’re here, right?

So how do we reconcile a God who is to be feared with a God who desires to be intimately known?

I hope it’s quite clear that that’s not how our human relationships should be. Marriage or parenting or friendship should never be about fear.

But then why should fear be a part of a relationship with God?

I would submit to you that fear is a natural human reaction to the unknown.

It’s not so much that it’s part of God’s nature to be fearsome. It’s human nature to be afraid. For that matter, it’s a trait that a lot of living things have in common: that fight-or-flight reaction to a stressor. Possums play dead, ostriches stick their heads in the ground, kangaroos box, and even rhododendrons curl their thick, stiff leaves when cold threatens them.

It’s natural to be afraid of something that’s unknown. And God is the greatest unknown in all creation. God is the unknowable, the infinite, the unfathomable.

The psalmist is right to point out that natural reaction, I think. And to point that out as a good starting point. Recognizing that God isn’t just some friend we’ve known all our lives, but is, in fact, far bigger and less predictable than all of creation’s collected consciousness could ever begin to imagine.

God is big. Unimaginably big. And it’s okay to be afraid of God’s bigness.

In fact, it’s wise to fear God’s bigness. And not because fear is a mature characteristic of our faith, or that it’s particularly smart or well-informed. Just because it’s a healthy choice.

But it’s a healthy choice to start with.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

We begin by recognizing that God is unsearchable, infinite in all ways. Then we move on from there.

We don’t talk about wisdom much in the Church today. We talk about faithfulness, about discipleship sometimes. In the United Methodist Church, we talk a lot right now about vitality. But we don’t talk about wisdom.

And that’s a pity. Because Jesus calls us to a very deep and holistic kind of wisdom.

Remember that Jesus sums up all the law and the prophets into one two-fold command: love God and love neighbor as you love yourself. And in his own sometimes subtle ways, and through Peter’s rooftop vision in Acts 10 in a much more direct way, the Spirit informs us that those old laws are for a people who were called to be set apart, but we are called to something different.

We are called to the wisdom of discerning what is loving and what is not.

And that, in and of itself, is intimidating. We are wise when we realize that we won’t always make the best and the most loving choices. We are wise when we realize that sometimes the choices we have all reside outside of black and white sensitivities of right and wrong, that sometimes the only choices we have are very gray.

We are wise when we realize that because there is a new covenant, we are now more responsible for our actions, and not because we are called to higher account, but because there is more of the decision-making process in which we have to participate. We now have to decide whether a behavior or a word shared is good or evil, whether it is blessing or curse, whether it is loving or hurtful.

Paul actually gives us a good model to follow, not because it’s a set of rules, but because it sets our hearts right when we practice it:

be filled with the Spirit in the following ways: ¹⁹ speak to each other with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; sing and make music to the Lord in your hearts; ²⁰ always give thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ

Paul is suggesting that life become worship. Speak to each other in ways that are beautiful and uplifting like psalms and hymns. Instead of making monotone or discord, find a way to make your heart sing!

That is called “improved quality of life”, folks. That’s something God wants for us. It’s not all about getting to the end of the race. It’s about making the most of the time we have, making this life here and now a blessing, to us and to each other.

That’s called being satisfied, which is a gift only Jesus can give, a feast of God.

Our Old Testament readings for the next few weeks focus on Solomon, who is person on whom all our wisdom literature focuses. And it’s because of this request he makes that we share today, even though his particular request is very specific:

⁹Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?

It’s a very important and relevant request for us today, when so many of our prayers deal with what we face right now, in this instant. We seldom see the big picture and talk to God about how God is guiding us through the larger span of our lives, let alone how God is guiding our communities and the Church universal through the miracle of salvation.

So as we talk about wisdom in the coming weeks, I want to encourage you to open yourself to God’s bigger story.

Solomon asked for wisdom in his particular context, for a sense of responsibility and discernment for the leadership role he was taking on at the time.

I encourage you to seek our wisdom and discernment in your own life, in your work, in your relationships.

Begin with the recognition that God’s unsearchable wisdom isn’t something you can comprehend, and that Jesus is leading us into a wisdom beyond our sense of rules and predictability.

Because it seems to me that when we open ourselves to God’s wisdom, we’ll discover that true wisdom isn’t learning to follow the letter of the law. True wisdom is simply learning to love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

No Time for Wrath; a sermon for the eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:35, 41-51

³⁵ Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

⁴¹ The Jewish opposition grumbled about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

⁴² They asked, “Isn’t this Jesus, Joseph’s son, whose mother and father we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

⁴³ Jesus responded, “Don’t grumble among yourselves. ⁴⁴ No one can come to me unless they are drawn to me by the Father who sent me, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁴⁵ It is written in the Prophets, And they will all be taught by God. s Everyone who has listened to the Father and learned from him comes to me. ⁴⁶ No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God. He has seen the Father. ⁴⁷ I assure you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸ I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹ Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and they died. ⁵⁰ This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that whoever eats from it will never die. ⁵¹ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

¹⁴ Let the words of my mouth

and the meditations of my heart

be pleasing to you,

LORD , my rock and my redeemer.

What I would like to think is that, as the Church matures, she learns to better live into the hope and the promise of Christ. I would like to think that faith matures over generations. I would like to think that we understand the Way of Christ better now than the authors of our first-century texts. I would like to think that Christ has shown us a better way to live than the way of violence that David knew.

Because Jesus never says, Go to war with your neighbor. Jesus says, Who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

That’s the weird thing about reading stories like our passage from 2 Samuel. David is a very warlike king. At the time, it was all people knew. You didn’t send diplomats to a neighboring kingdom; you didn’t negotiate two- or six-way talks with your enemies. You just waged war against them. That’s what Summer was for.

And during the season of war, people died. A lot of people.

Samuel reports that twenty thousand men died in this operation. That’s almost the entire population of Scott County. Imagine.

I like to think we’ve learned to move beyond that. That followers of Christ know better than to think that anything but violence will ever come of violence.

I’d like to think that the Church would grow into Christ’s radical imagination, into God’s sense of relationship with each other and with the world, because it’s not us-against-them. It’s us-for-them, us bringing creation out of the mire that sin holds us in and declaring an end to it.

Paul’s message to the church in Ephesus isn’t just a random list of proverbs or advice. It’s a hint at a way of living in Christ:

²⁶ Be angry without sinning. Don’t let the sun set on your anger. ²⁷ Don’t provide an opportunity for the devil. ²⁸ Thieves should no longer steal. Instead, they should go to work, using their hands to do good so that they will have something to share with whoever is in need.

²⁹ Don’t let any foul words come out of your mouth. Only say what is helpful when it is needed for building up the community so that it benefits those who hear what you say. ³⁰ Don’t make the Holy Spirit of God unhappy—you were sealed by him for the day of redemption. ³¹ Put aside all bitterness, losing your temper, anger, shouting, and slander, along with every other evil. ³² Be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other, in the same way God forgave you in Christ.

I hope that you can take that seriously. I try. I don’t succeed all the time. But I try to let kindness and compassion and forgiveness be a more consistent way of living than bitterness, wrath, anger, shouting, slander, and all the other curses that do more damage to people than we’d ever realize.

I try. And I want to encourage you to try. You won’t get it right every time. You may not get it right most of the time, but if you try, and try, and try, and try, then your trying will become a practice, and your practice will become a habit, and your habit will become such a part of you that you couldn’t possibly be other than kind, compassionate, and forgiving.

It is vital that we do this, friends. Vital. Immediately necessary. Because this is no time for wrath.

The world has enough of wrath. I thank God every day that we cut off our cable, because I don’t have to listen to the political wrangling being shouted at me through commercial television time. I am surrounded by enough angry talk that I don’t need it in my down time.

The world has enough of wrath, coming at us from every angle. Wrath has been the way of humanity throughout history. It is so ingrained that often we imagine that there can be no means of solving conflict except through wrath.

Wrath is poison.

And poison isn’t the diet of someone who claims to follow Christ.

Our diet is living bread. Bread. Something that nourishes. Not something that destroys. Not something that causes death, but something that causes life.

Life is what Jesus offers us, not death. Life is what Jesus calls us to bring. When will we learn that? When will we finally turn our backs, as a Church, on wrath and on the cruel and senseless ways of the world?

I suppose it has to start with each one of us. We must, individually, choose that each of our interactions will bring peace instead of conflict. We must choose to

be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other, in the same way God forgave [us] in Christ.

That means holding the door for the neighbor with her hands full; listening and sitting with the neighbor who may have just had a bad day; not letting it ruin our day when our neighbor’s cat uses the flower bed as a litter box as a matter of practice, because any number of things we do are at least as annoying and troublesome.

Little things. Because God knows that we need to take baby steps. God knows that we can’t just turn around right away. Becoming a disciple is like dieting. Sure, you could go on a water diet and lose fifty pounds in a couple weeks, but you won’t be healthy and you won’t have actually changed anything permanently. Healthy living takes longer to learn and develop. Growing in our faith, growing away from wrath into loving-kindness takes time, just a coupe pounds each week, with reasonable goals that add up to big changes.

God is ridiculously patient with us, because God knows all the stuff that gets in our way and that can keep us from making the big changes that need to happen for us to learn to be disciples. And if God is that patient with us, shouldn’t we be that patient with ourselves and with our neighbors?

Therefore, imitate God like dearly loved children. ² Live your life with love, following the example of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. He was a sacrificial offering that smelled sweet to God.

We all are aware that the world in which we’re living is wounded and in need of healing. Let’s not make it worse.

Almost three centuries ago now, John Wesley set forth three simple guidelines for the people the world called “methodist”. In short, they are:

Do good.

Do no harm.

Attend upon the ordinances of God.

That is, make sure all the things you do are blessing, and not curse. Make a point of exercising lovingkindness rather than wrath. And pay attention to the things that make for a holy life.

If we live those three things in our lives, we will leave more and more room for the Holy Spirit to remake us, to reshape us into what God intends for us. And then God will revitalize the Church. And then God’s Kingdom will come into this wretched, wounded world.

Do good. Do no harm. Attend upon the ordinances of God.

Because this is no time - because we have no time - for wrath. We must make time for love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.