Chow Down

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 15B, August 16, 2015

A couple nights ago I dreamed that Jesus had been spotted in Seattle. It seems that he and his disciples had caught a bus from downtown to Broadway. They were heading for St. Mark’s Cathedral, and they could have bused the entire way, but Jesus made them get off at the Rite Aid and walk from there. The disciples complained, because their feet were sore, but they were used to this kind of treatment. Besides, Jesus wanted to stop off at a certain barber shop and get a haircut. In the dream, I heard all about this from the barber who had cut Jesus’ hair, and who was now cutting mine. I felt starstruck, to be sure, but not really surprised. It was like the way I felt in real life once many years ago when I saw Krist Novoselic, the bass player for Nirvana, getting his hair cut in the chair next to mine. 

And that’s the funny thing about Christianity: honestly, at this point, nothing should surprise us. Once God has become a human being, died, come back again, ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit, anything can happen. Christians do indeed talk about seeing Jesus in various places. The literal and the metaphorical have become inextricably linked. Jesus has been upending all our expectations from the get-go, as he does in this story in which he refers to himself as living bread and invites us to eat him. Really, this is also like something that could only happen in a dream. 

It’s no wonder the people of Capernaum are flummoxed by what Jesus is saying. His words resist efforts to take them literally, but as metaphors, they offer so many possibilities that it’s hard to lay hands on any one understanding. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” What is this, a zombie movie? 

It’s almost as if Jesus relishes their confusion, because he changes verbs to deepen his point. First he restates his point: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” But next the gospel writer has Jesus begin to use a different Greek word for “eat,” and this one has earthier connotations. Especially in conversation about animals, people might use this version of “eat” to mean “crunch, munch, gnaw, or nibble.” For all our efforts thus far to say, “It’s only a metaphor,” this one starts to push back. We are not to think of eating Jesus as a mere absorption of a spiritual concept, devoid of any physicality. This kind of eating makes slurping noises.

Jesus over pizza.

Furthermore, another connotation of the word is to share close comradeship, as people do when they frequently eat together. So when we eat Jesus, it is raw, gutsy, and creaturely, and we are not dining solo. It’s like someone bringing out a bunch of pizzas and saying, “All right, everyone, chow down!” It’s not a dignified banquet: this is a party, and we are invited to “chow down” on Jesus in the form of wine and bread.

 

(Incidentally, this is a good reason not to get stressed out about whether a child is old enough to take communion. The most reverent way to take communion is simply to consume it. If your toddler rejects the bread or throws it across the room, you just pick it up and eat it. Jesus’ feelings have not been hurt, and your parenting skills are not in question!) 

When I first sat down to work on this sermon, I was typing a lot of random thoughts about bread, and my daughter came and watched over my shoulder for a while. She reminded me that Jesus was alone and starving in the wilderness when the devil suggested, “Turn these stones into bread.” But Jesus replied, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Maybe, my daughter suggested, Jesus doesn’t need to make bread to feed himself, because Jesus IS the bread. That reminded me of another time, when his disciples are urging Jesus to eat something, and he says, “I have other bread that you don’t know about.” But once there are a bunch of hungry people around, Jesus stops being so cagey. He feeds thousands with bread and fish. “Chow down!” And at a wedding in Cana, Jesus provides the wine. Maybe Jesus is able to do that because he himself IS the wine. 

In both situations, it is as if he were giving them his very self to eat and drink, as he does with his disciples at the Last Supper. And then he says, “Keep doing this when you are together, even when you can’t see me, and I will be there.” Bread gives sustenance, and wine gives gladness. These are two things Jesus wants us to have. But Jesus only functions as true bread and wine when we are sharing this meal together. And so we don’t just admire Jesus, and we don’t just imitate Jesus. We get together to consume Jesus as something physical. And so Jesus calls himself “living bread.” 

We don’t normally think of bread as something living. The wheat that once grew has been harvested, crushed, and mixed with other ingredients in order to nourish us. But Jesus identifies himself as “living bread.” What might happen to us if we were to eat “living bread”? Might it not merely strengthen us, but also begin to transform us from the inside into something we have not yet become? 

There’s an undeniable connection here between our eating and drinking, and our participation in eternal life, for Jesus gives as an explanation, “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” Jesus’ body and blood are real, genuine, trustworthy. They will do what food and drink are supposed to do: nourish us. So what’s the connection to being “raised up on the last day”? I think it means that Christ’s body and blood are our sustenance for the long haul—towards the grave and beyond. Whatever is happening spiritually as we physically consume the bread and wine, we can’t possibly understand, but only trust to be beneficial. If Jesus is the Word made Flesh, then Jesus is a truer bread than the kind we eat every day. “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” And the writer of John’s gospel told us at the beginning that Jesus Christ is THE Word. 

If at this point you’re left with far more questions than answers, that’s not only OK—it’s great! I long for answers to my deepest questions, but I also long for more questions, because so often the longing is even better than the having. As Oscar Wilde once said, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” It is exciting to explore the links between the literal and the metaphorical. 

For instance, what does Jesus mean when he says we will live forever? Everyone still dies, and we know that we will, too. Will our lives continue in a different way after we die, such that our mortal death doesn’t actually count as death? Or will our limited lives take on infinite and eternal value, as seen from outside the very construct of time? 

What of the people who do not eat this bread, who are not Christians? What of the billions of non-Christians who have died, both before Jesus and since? Do they not live forever? Or are there other ways that they might live forever as well? If God is all-loving and compassionate, how could God not provide for them as God does for us? 

What does it mean to be “raised up on the last day”? Does this mean that all of creation will be renewed at once, in an instant? Will it be that obvious? Will it happen on this side of the grave? Will it occur when the world ends naturally, or will it upset the laws of science and physics? Will it come like a social justice utopia that we have a hand in creating? Or could “the last day” simply mean the time of each of our deaths, with all of us reuniting on the other side of the tomb? 

That’s a lot of questions, and I apologize for the overload. Christians have asked all of these questions and many more in the past two thousand years. But there’s a risk here, too: not to become content with merely enjoying the questions. We are not just to cogitate about living bread and eternal life, but to go out into the world and live these things. In order to do this, we need wisdom. 

When Solomon becomes king of Israel, he doesn’t ask for intelligence, but wisdom, and there’s a big difference. If you are intelligent, it means you have an easy time learning lots of things, and that’s a good gift to have. But wisdom compounds the benefits of our intelligence. Wisdom means having a sense for which things are the most important, and how they can help lots of people … not just ourselves. Intelligence is abstract; wisdom is concrete. Intelligence is all in the head and, by itself, can lead to arrogance; but wisdom is applied intelligence, connecting the head to the heart and leading to compassionate action in real life. 

I am convinced that, as Christians, we are fed with wisdom from this table: God’s wisdom. It takes humility to partake of Jesus, and humility is the root of wisdom. Like Solomon, we are to admit, “I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.” Wisdom begins where our knowing leaves off. When we admit to ourselves that we can never know everything … when we admit that we don’t even have a right to know anything in particular … then we have begun a path towards wisdom. 

So we are to rely on God to feed us, not with the certainty of intelligence, but with the questions of wisdom. God feeds us wisdom by being incarnate for us in Jesus. In a moment, we’ll recite the Nicene Creed, that heady but important 4^th-century formulation of basic Christian theology. But then we’ll connect our beliefs to action in the Prayers of the People. We’ll humble ourselves by confessing our sins to God. And we’ll round it all off by coming to the table to partake of Jesus. As a united people called Christians, we will chew on Jesus’ body and audibly gulp his blood, so that we also can feed the world with God’s wisdom. 

Because we do this, we needn’t be surprised to see Jesus showing up in all kinds of places in our lives. He might be getting a haircut in Seattle. Better yet, he might be speaking within you right now, urging you: “Come to the table. I want you to participate in who I am, to do your part in renewing my whole creation and turning it into a party. The table is richly laid. Come and chow down!” Amen.

Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit ...

sermon preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 10B, July 12, 2015

I once knew a high school girl who carried her Bible around with her a lot. She had put a sticker on its cover—a sticker that came into existence in the late 1980s thanks to musicians like Guns N’ Roses and the 2 Live Crew. The sticker on her Bible read, “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content.”

So I hope you’ll laugh with me that on the Sunday when we look back and celebrate that annual super bowl of children’s ministry, Vacation Bible School, what happens in our gospel reading? A king ogles his own daughter and awards her sexy dance routine with a severed head. Great. But this reading carries even more frightening connotations for us now, connotations we can’t laugh at, with the over-sexualization of young girls in the entertainment industry on the one hand, and so-called ISIS frequently beheading people as a political tool on the other. Our instincts urge us to shield our children from all that is risqué and violent in the world. But the Bible is about real life, and real life is rarely age-appropriate. So, then, the Holy Spirit may have something else in mind.

Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (Titian)

Some of you may ask, “Why this reading? Couldn’t you have used something else?” And the answer is no—we Episcopalians believe strongly in sticking with the readings we are given in the centuries-old lectionary cycle, not because we cannot change, but because we believe it’s not up to us to dictate all the conditions of our worship. Indeed, we share these readings today with millions of Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Reformed Christians, Moravians, Disciples of Christ, Unitarian Univeralists, and a variety of other Christian denominations all over the world. So the weekly lectionary is a rare and strong sign of Christian unity, one that shouldn’t be thrown out.

In the Episcopal Church, we love the Bible, and we try to hear and to absorb whatever message it sends us today. And then it’s the preacher’s job to try to find the good news in the reading—no matter what it is—and to use it to connect to God’s good news at work in the lives of all of us.

So what is the good news here? What could possibly be good news in the grisly execution of John, one of the true heroes of Jesus’ time? Believe it or not, I think it has something to do with the theme we used for Vacation Bible School last week. And it has everything to do with the questions: “To whom do we listen? And based on what we hear, what do we decide to do?”

First, “To whom do we listen?” The theme of our Vacation Bible School this year was “Message Received: Hearing God’s Call.” Throughout the week, we sang, played, created, and told the stories of Samuel, Esther, Mary, Jesus’ disciples, and Lydia. Today we add the story of John, a homeless man who dressed in camel’s hair and ate locusts. John used harsh words to pronounce God’s judgment on all those who would stand in the way of people’s relationship with God. And then he announced that the long-awaited Messiah, the savior of the world, was on his way. 

When Jesus did show up, John’s job was to baptize him and get out of the way. Judgment, no matter how correct, needed to stand aside to make way for mercy. Both John and Jesus listened to God. Both John and Jesus were eventually murdered. Why? Because to people who assume they’re in good with God, the only thing scarier than God’s judgment is God’s mercy. Of course, Jesus did have harsh words of judgment for religious insiders who abused their power and their privileges. When we are given ears to listen to God’s judgment, we have to admit that we’re guilty of a lot of bad behavior. But Jesus’ judgment was also charged with mercy and forgiveness. And if we are forgiven, then other people are forgiven as well—people we’d rather see punished!

So that means that when we listen to God, we have to be ready to open our hearts ever wider. In order to be citizens of God’s kingdom, we have to let go of condemning people, and giving up on people, and insisting that people be punished. We have to want health and healing and wholeness for everyone—even those who hate us. And if that’s too hard for us, it means that we’re still working on becoming citizens of God’s kingdom.

In this work that is, in many ways, a letting go of unnecessary work, prayer is our greatest tool. We taught the kids this week that prayer is something we need to make time for every day. We can bring all sorts of feelings into prayer: joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust. We are able to bring all of these feelings before God because Jesus felt them, too. So when we pray, no matter what we are feeling, God is there to help us through it. We might hear God speak to us in the silence of our hearts, and many of the kids told us they understood what that is like. We might even hear a real voice in our ears—a couple of the kids at VBS spoke of having had such an experience, and I’m not prepared to disbelieve them.

Yes, God is already speaking to our children and has been since the day they were born. That goes for us, too. So … “to whom do we listen?” Do we spend more time listening to human voices—to voices that promise quick fixes and easy answers, to voices that pander to our worst instincts, to voices that insist on keeping us busy and distracted at best, and judgmental and hateful at worst?

Or do we clear away the clutter and make time and make space to listen to that still, small voice inside us? When and how do you pray? If you are part of a family, do you pray together? When and how? Do you read the Bible and make connections between those ancient words and whatever is going on in your life right now? Are you ready to receive gifts from God through prayer, even if those gifts are not at all what you had requested?

All week at Vacation Bible School, we sang a song that names gifts God gives us in prayer: “Listen! Listen, God is calling/ Through the Word inviting/ Offering forgiveness, comfort, and joy.” Forgiveness, comfort, and joy are gifts that God gives us—hopeful gifts, even if such gifts mean we have to do the hard work of changing and growing. God is always speaking love into our hearts, if we have ears to listen. As we grow and change throughout our lives, God is there to help. And so, this week, we also sang the old spiritual: “Ev’ry time I feel the Spirit/ Moving in my heart, I will pray.”

Then comes the second question: “Based on what we hear, what do we decide to do?” Learning to understand what we hear in prayer is called discernment, and it’s a skill we never finish developing. In the first letter of John, it’s called “testing the spirits.” John the Baptist listened to the voice of God and spoke the truth. He let people know that change was coming—change in the way God relates to all of us. Then John began to take his marching orders from Jesus. He baptized Jesus, and we know he kept working after that, because his work got him thrown into prison, where he sat on that fateful night when Herodias (who, confusingly enough, seems to have had the same name as her mother) danced for her father.

Sometimes listening to God and taking our marching orders from Jesus leads to dire consequences. At the very least, it will sometimes make life more difficult. It will inspire us to give of ourselves for others, to deepen our compassion for every human being, and sometimes to speak truth to power … to take an unpopular stand. Sometimes it will leave us feeling disoriented and lost, because only God knows the way. And then, as we follow that way, we will find that it leads us to places we never could have imagined. Eventually we will learn that even death is no barrier to God’s love for us. Jesus demonstrated this most powerfully for us on the cross, where he hung in agony and simultaneously forgave his enemies. Such hard-won strength takes practice. Such unconditional love comes through years of prayer.

Christianity is about real life, and real life is rarely age-appropriate. If you have children in your life, don’t hide this fact from them. Share your own struggles—in ways they can understand, to be sure, and without unduly overloading them. Don’t make them responsible for your feelings, but do keep finding ways to connect them with the larger world into which they are growing, and to look upon this world with eyes of compassion.

Indeed, that kind of work was happening this week at St. Paul’s. On Thursday morning we all gathered in the Great Hall: the entire group of children, along with teen and adult helpers, and along with various parents who were arriving to take them home. Together we sang “Here I Am, Lord,” the chorus of which goes: “Here I am, Lord/ Is it I, Lord?/ I have heard you calling in the night/ I will go, Lord/ If you lead me/ I will hold your people in my heart.” We sang the final chorus a cappella, and as the last note faded into silence, the silence lingered in the air. Yes, a group of sixty children ages 3 to 10 was completely silent for a number of seconds, until I finally broke the silence to dismiss them to their homes. In retrospect, I wish I’d let the silence go on longer, because I perceived that God was speaking through that silence to every one of us. Amen.

Go Yourself

homily preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA

by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Curate
Readings: Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 116:1-8; Matthew 9:1-8

Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac

When I was in seminary, I had the distinct pleasure of translating the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac from Hebrew into some semblance of English. The first thing I noticed when translating it is the lack of emotional language in the passage. We don’t hear how anybody feels; we only hear what they do.

Emotion may be the single most important commonality of all human life in every place and time. I have learned in recent years that my ability to name and express my emotions in appropriate ways has everything to do with my ability to make good decisions regarding my relationships with others. To look at it from the other direction, our relative inability to feel—especially, the widespread cultural expectation that men should not express emotions in sensitive ways—may be one of the greatest evils we face. How many killings could be avoided if people, especially men, were able to say to themselves, “Hey, I’m angry,” before reacting to that anger? How many divorces could be avoided if couples knew right from the start how to express their emotions respectfully to each other, trusting that those emotions would be received with care and love?

During the summer of seminary when I interned in a retirement community, my mentor said, “Men don’t usually tell you how they’re feeling. You have to listen deeply for the emotion underneath. So let them tell their stories, and whatever you do, don’t hinder those stories. Let them finish. Receive their stories with love and care, and within them, you’ll hear and understand the feelings they have never been taught how to name.”

So we needn’t be surprised to find so little emotion in this story of Abraham and Isaac, and, for that matter, throughout much of the Bible. Perhaps lack of expressed emotion is an unthinking byproduct of the fact that the Bible was probably all written by men—or maybe it’s by design. Maybe by removing the characters’ emotions from the story, we are better able to place ourselves into it. How would you feel if God told you, in no uncertain terms, to kill your child … your only child … whom you love? (I’ve always wondered how Sarah felt, or if Abraham ever told her what had happened, even afterward.) But Abraham doesn’t react with emotion. He just obeys.

The classical understanding of Abraham’s obedience is that his faith in God is so strong, he never has any doubts that this will turn out OK. If Isaac is miraculously spared, it will be OK. If Isaac is killed, somehow, God will make that OK, too. But with all due respect to centuries of tradition that maintains this view, I think its helpfulness in our own culture is a bit limited. What father could possibly do this? What good father wouldn’t rage against God, or just flat-out refuse to honor the commandment? Doesn’t Abraham at least owe his son a strong emotional reaction?

Likewise, rabbis and priests throughout the ages have taught about Isaac’s supreme act of obedience, as evidenced by his apparent lack of reaction to being bound as a potential sacrifice. Either he is a remarkably self-aware youth who doesn’t mind that God wants him dead, or he is a grown man who still doesn’t seem inclined to use his adult strength to fight off his hundred-year-old father. The story doesn’t tell us that Isaac was compliant, or that Abraham somehow overpowered him. It only says that Abraham bound him. What are we to make of this?

No emotion. No emotion anywhere. And yet … when we receive this story with care and love and hear it through to completion, this story is dripping with emotion. God says, “Take now your son … your only son … whom you love … Isaac.” This is the child of promise, the child who demonstrates God’s love for the human race in the divine promise to make from Abraham a people who will be a blessing to the entire world. Isaac is the only thread binding Abraham to all of us today. Isaac is of crucial importance to the fate of the entire world.

After identifying in no uncertain terms the object of the story, God says something very strange to Abraham. Our translation has God telling Abraham to “go,” but that’s a great example of the English language not being built to convey the proper meaning of a Hebrew word. God actually tells Abraham, “Lech lech’a,” which we could render literally as, “Go you,” or “Get you going,” or even, “Go yourself.” It’s a verb tense called ethical dative. We find it in English in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew in the phrase, “Knock me at this gate,” and we understand instinctively that Petruchio isn’t asking for a clonk on the head. So, God tells Abraham, “Go you”—“go yourself.” The implication might even be, “As you go to the Mount of Moriah, you will find that you are journeying ever more deeply into the very essence of who you are.”

We also find strong emotion underneath a few recurring words and phrases. When God calls Abraham, Abraham replies, “Hineini”—that is, “Behold: here I am.” When Isaac gets inquisitive on the journey and says, “My father,” Abraham replies, “Hineini, my son.” And when the angel of the Lord calls to Abraham from heaven, Abraham also replies, “Hineini—Behold: here I am.” Abraham’s raw, naked presence stands before God and before Abraham’s beloved son. Abraham is present in all that he is. He has truly gone more and more deeply into his very essence.

You may also have noticed that when Abraham leaves his servants behind and goes on alone with Isaac, he instructs them to wait there, “and we will worship, and we will return to you.” We will return. Does Abraham say this in order to hide God’s command from Isaac for the time being? Or does he say it because he cannot imagine that Isaac will not survive this ordeal somehow? What agony is going on inside him?

There is even emotion in the angel’s response—which, in typical form in the most ancient Hebrew writings, begins to sounds more like God’s voice with every passing word. “Stay your hand and don’t do any harm to him, for now I know that you are one who fears God, and you have not withheld your son … your only son … from me.”

God holds us in life, and God holds us in death. God is one who demands everything of us, because there is no reality in which we might preserve ourselves apart from God. Let’s remember that with these most ancient stories, especially, the appropriate question is not, “Did this event really happen?,” but rather, “What is this story for?” While we may quibble with the premise that God would test Abraham—and Isaac, for that matter!—in such a cruel and manipulative way, I don’t think that’s what this story is for. Closer to its purpose is something about the all-encompassing sovereignty of God, that not only we but also our children and all our hopes and all our future are ever held in God’s loving embrace.

Also closer to its purpose must be something about the fact that Isaac is not killed after all. The tribe next door may sacrifice their children to Molech with frightening regularity. But we, the people of Adonai, we will not be like other peoples. We understand the fear of God not to be an abject fear that the crops will die, but a deep reverence and awe in the face of God’s unrelenting love in all circumstances, good or bad. We know that God wants not only our obedience, but our joy. God wants us to have life, and have it abundantly. And so we obey God in all things—because those who fear God know that they have nothing to fear. When God calls, we say, “Hineini.” And when we do, we trust that we will hear the command, lech lech’a: go yourself. Amen.