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| A beloved Farside cartoon by Whyatt Cartoons |
August 11, 2024—The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 14
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
© 2021-2024 Seth Olson
This sermon was preached at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles in Hoover, AL. A video of this sermon may be found here.
Holy God, let my words be your words and when my words are not your words, let your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.
Perhaps you have seen the signs when driving along the interstate. No, not the Alexander Shunnarah ones. In bold text, an even bolder question, “If you died tonight, where would you go? Heaven or Hell?!!!” When I see such billboards, I lose my temper—I wonder, how can someone short-change the message of God’s love in this way? Reducing the beauty, the complexity, and the immensity of Jesus’ Way of Love into an either-or question leaves me feeling angry.
Memories from my youth emerge: Walking through southside Birmingham and seeing well-meaning Christians wrapped in fear trying to scare others into believing. Their shouts of “Have you been saved?” or “Do you believe?” crackling from a cheap bullhorn.
These questions remind me of a Far Side Cartoon. In it two clean-cut, white men dressed in khakis, short-sleeved button up shirts, and ties are standing at a woman’s front door. They ask her, “Have you found Jesus?” In the living room of the home barely visible are Jesus’ sandal-clad feet, hiding behind a curtain for a big picture window. Friends, if you recall nothing else from today’s sermon remember that Jesus isn’t playing hide-and-seek trying to evade you—and a perfectly acceptable response to “When were you saved?” is 2,000 years ago on Calvary when God in Christ fully revealed that nothing separates us from God’s love—not sin, not death, not nothing! (Sorry for the bad grammar)
All the fear-based yelling of Christians into megaphones has caused a great mess within our society. Or, maybe their shouting has merely revealed the disorder—we are collectively struggling over what to believe. And, belief and believe have become such overburdened words that we may be confused about what it means to believe.
For many of our friends in other parts of the Church belief simply means to give ascent to something—to check off a certain list of criteria about God and ourselves. For many believing means to think the way others do, the way the pastor says to think, or to accept things in the right way as to avoid Hell. Sure, this is what believing means to some, but what did Jesus mean when using this word? What was the Head of Our Church saying when he articulated that believing leads to eternal life?
This morning, we heard Jesus in the continuation of a larger story from John’s Gospel account. The “Bread of Life Discourse” as some refer to it. (Are you sick of bread yet? Got any Gluten-free believers now?) In this conversation, Jesus described himself as the Bread of Life and the Bread of Heaven—using the Hebrew story of the manna from above to elaborate on what he came to do in the world. When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life” this was the first “I am” statement in this Gospel account. He would later state, I am the Light of the World; the Gate; the Good Shepherd; the Resurrection and the Life; the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and the Vine. But if we are to walk in love and into eternity with Jesus, do we have to believe Jesus literally? Was Jesus really bread or a vine? Is that believing?
You may be shocked to hear this, but Jesus was not a grape vine nor a bread loaf. When we go to the altar rail we are not participating in gruesome cannibalism. Jesus spoke in expansive language with many layers. When we meet him in Communion, we do truly take hold of Christ, but there is more happening than we will ever know, or we can even imagine. And so, we cannot take in all that is going on up here at God’s Table. Of course, it is easier to take hold of what is happening together.
When we gather as a church community, we sometimes say that we are re-membering the Body of Christ. We are putting Christ’s Body back together—sorry, Humpty Dumpty. It’s crazy, but we are constituting the Body of Christ right now. And, at the same time the words that we hear as we stretch out our hands at the altar rail are “The Body of Christ.” You all—the Body of Christ—are meeting the Body of Christ during Communion. Talk about “You are what you eat!” And, there’s even more to this whole believing thing.
This is the way, Thomas Merton, the great mystic from Kentucky put it:
The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers [and sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.[1]
We have to be the Body of Christ—that we already are! I can believe that.
There’s a hymn about this sort of believing. Foster Bailey, the organist at St. John’s, Decatur, often would ask me what my favorite hymn was. The richness of our hymnody is often too much for me to narrow it down to just one, so I would change my answer constantly. Usually whatever I would tell him, would make him roll his eyes. Today, my favorite hymn might just be “The Church’s One Foundation.” For in the last stanza we sing, “Yet she [the Church] on earth hath union with God the Three in One, and mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won; O happy ones and holy! Lord give us grace that we, like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.”
I can’t help but get misty eyed when I sing those words. I know that there are those who have joined the great cloud of witnesses who still commune with us. This isn’t a ghost story either, so do not allow the fear from other parts of society soak into us too. The bullhorn shouting about going to heaven or hell distracts us from hearing Christ Jesus reassuring us, “I will raise them up on the last day.” We miss this as we worry: “Do I get to be part of the exclusive club? What if I believe in the wrong way? What if I mess this whole thing up?” We fret about what Jesus said when he talked about belief, but what he meant was not doing a certain set of things or thinking a particular way or consenting to what the preacher tells you to do. Jesus pointed to the non-permanent nature of the manna in the wilderness to drive home the truth of believing.
To believe—to really eat the bread of life, to be transformed by what happens in mystic sweet communion—to believe is to trust God. To walk in love means to follow Jesus’ example in giving over our whole lives to the Creator of the Universe to be blessed and transformed. This is actually harder than checking off a few things a preacher says to do. That was the case with Israelites.
Way back when, manna was not the problem. The trouble was that those who were in the desert with Moses did not trust God. They grumbled. They pleaded for more than just the bread that was keeping them alive. And, I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I often do the same.
When problems arise, I doubt. Which is a natural response and appropriate! God still believes in me, even when I don’t believe in God. But, when I forget, when we forget our true identities as God’s beloveds, that God is holding us up, and that God is with us (all of us, at all times, and in all places)—when we forget this, we can easily turn our religion into a weapon.
When we disconnect from the truth that we are all God’s beloved children, we can wield Christianity as a sword to beat away disbelief or more troublingly unbelievers. This was not the way Jesus walked. This was not what Jesus meant by believing. And this is not what keeps us in eternal life.
Jesus showed us a way that was and is different. He did not encourage people to think in only one way, so that they could eat bread that would never get moldy. No, he showed us a more important bread through which we might recover our original unity with God. Jesus showed us the way into eternal life. It is not through accenting to what a fear-filled preacher says, so that you can think that your group is better than others. Instead, we are called into a radical practice of trusting that God’s love for us and for all is infinite. It is eternally expansive and completely comprehensive. God’s love has even dissolved the sting of death. And, as crazy as this sounds with an election in 85 days, God’s love has the power to make us one.
We are called to trust God. That is believing. When we eat the bread of belief, we remember that we are already part of the Body of Christ. What we must be is what we already are.
What do you believe?
[1] Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7711632-the-deepest-level-of-communication-is-not-communication-but-communion.
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