Love Unites Proper 17B

Love Unites   Proper 17B

Jesus’s followers, which includes more than just the twelve, are a mixed crowd, which we have seen elsewhere includes Gentiles, non-Judeans, non-Israelites. Some Pharisees see them sharing a meal, and take note that some of them, not all of them, are “eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders…). So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” [i] 

Storyteller Mark attempts to help the reader/listener to understand that the Pharisees go beyond the commandments of God as outlined in Torah in an effort to make all of Israel holy and righteous, in the hope that YWHW will once again deliver them, this time from the empire of Rome. They also observe the “traditions of the elders,” traditions accumulated over centuries that in effect erect a fence around the Torah. In this case, where Torah lays out certain dietary restriction known commonly as kosher, the elders and the Pharisees go beyond kosher by requiring that hands be washed, made undefiled, before eating at all. This is not a kosher law, and contrary to Mark’s description, not all Jews at the time of Jesus washed their hands before meals, a practice prescribed specifically for the Temple priesthood, not for your average Israelite. 

Jesus calls them hypocrites, which in Greek theatrical culture means one who plays a part, and suggests that perhaps they are posers claiming to be more pious and righteous than Moses, who, when addressing those delivered from Pharaoh’s Egypt about to leave the wilderness to enter the land of promise, reviews what they have learned of God’s commands for them and says, “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God with which I am charging you.” [ii] 

Jesus then reminds them of what the prophet Isaiah had to say about these “traditions” you speak of, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” [iii]  To which he adds, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” 

Jesus goes on to remind them how another “tradition of the elders” leads one to violate the command to Honor one’s father and mother. Then Jesus transcends the written tradition as well as those of the elders when he, in effect, abrogates the kosher dietary laws altogether: “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” [iv] 

Understandably, the Pharisees disappear from the narrative altogether! Jesus does not claim to return to a strict practice of the written tradition. Nor does he call for a reform of traditions of the elders. He does not reform the old order to make it more serviceable in the present circumstances, as the elders had done throughout the centuries. Jesus inaugurates something entirely new. The Pharisees disappear from the text presumably because there is nothing in their traditions, as sincere as their desire for holiness is, that they might say in return. What Jesus does is simply incomprehensible over against their deeply and faithfully held traditions. 

Like the Pharisees, we too might misconstrue what is being said here. Jesus does not say that religion is a matter of inward piety rather than external behavior; that one’s private spirituality is valued more highly than one’s physical actions in the world. Rather, Jesus warns that sin arises from within and leads to destructive behaviors such as fornication, theft, murder, and the like. The lack of holiness is marked not by breaches in the cultic code, nor by a lack of belief, but in bad behaviors that spring from evil intentions in our hearts often rooted in hate and division. 

This was the observation some decades later by the author of the Letter of James who writes, “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act-they will be blessed in their doing… Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  [v] 

Simply put, love of God and love of neighbor is the liberating essence of Torah. We are blessed in our doing, our doing for others. For love is the highest good that goes out to the other, for the sake of the other, not for our own sake – and it is in the “doing for the other” that we are blessed. Jesus is says that the Holiness and Righteousness which the Pharisees seek is not found by what we do or do not eat, or whether or not we wash our hands before meals, but in the simple reaching out to others in need. It is significant that this episode is preceded by the feeding of a mixed crowd of Gentiles and Jews, and followed by healing the daughter of a Gentile woman – who, by the way, teaches Jesus something about God’s love. When he says sharing his gifts with Gentiles is like throwing the children’s food to the dogs, she replies, “Yes, but even the dogs get the crumbs under the table.” He is astonished by her faith and remembers that doing God’s work is meant to unite us to one another rather than divide us. That all people are deserving of God’s healing love, mercy and forgiveness. In that moment, Jesus realizes we often have important things to learn from those who are most unlike ourselves. 

Jesus inaugurates a new age of God’s love. As Ilia Delio writes, “love [is] an irresistible ocean of attraction whose infinite goodness leads into the heart of God…For every act of love is a personalization of God and when God is born through our lives, heaven unfolds on earth. All that we long for and anticipate becomes a reality in this moment, in the here and now, in every particular act of love.” [vi]  Table fellowship with those unlike ourselves transcends washing one’s hands and is a blessing in itself. In welcoming strangers like the Gentile woman and all those different from us and our culture, we are transformed and blessed because love unites; love does not divide. When we act in love on behalf of the other, we are truly blessed. This is holiness, this is righteousness, for we finally become the image of God in this world that we are created to be!

---

[i] Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

[ii] Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

[iii] Isaiah 29:13

[iv] Ibid Mark 7

[v] James 1:17-27

[vi] Delio, Ilia, The Primacy of Love (Fortress Press, Minneapolis:2022) pp.11, 82

Abide In My Love Proper 16B

 Abide in My Love

Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum. [i] 

As we wrap up week five listening to chapter six of storyteller John’s Good News of Jesus, things begin to fall apart. The crowd of five thousand were truly impressed when Jesus distributed the bread and fish. Everyone got enough. No one got too much. It reminded them of the manna in the wilderness days of their ancestors. Every family could gather enough for one day. Gather more than needed and it would go bad. It would sour. It would become crawling with worms. But now he speaks of eating his flesh. Or, as the Greek text has it, they are to “gnaw” on his flesh, and drink his blood. He keeps saying, “I am the true bread that comes down from my Father’s home of love, mercy, and forgiveness.” 

They don’t know what to make of all this talk. What you are asking us to do is too hard, they say! We just want more bread like the other day. I’m not a baker, he says. I am no baker’s son, he says. One cannot live on bread alone, but on the Word of God. The opening verse of John’s story speaks of The Word. In the beginning the Word was with God. And the Word was God. But what on earth does all this mean.

Taken out of the context of the whole story, it all sounds weird. Even more weird, later, chapters 13-17 focus on the Last Supper where there is no mention of bread or wine. Instead, Jesus is on his knees washing feet. And he says, “If I, your Lord and Teacher, wash your feet, you must wash one another’s feet.” [ii] In chapter 15, however, he says, “Abide in me, as I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” [iii] What does it mean to abide? 

John tells us that the heart of the Last Supper, the very heart of the Eucharist, is love. The Father’s Love. Christ’s Love. We are to abide in Christ’s Love. To abide is to accept, to act in accordance with, to conform to. We are to accept and conform to Christ’s Love, which is his Father’s Love. And just how do we abide with Christ and one another? “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them… the one who eats this bread will live forever.” 

Every three years we spend five weeks with chapter 6 because this is where John gets to the heart of the Last Supper – the very heart of the Eucharist: God’s Love; Christ’s Love; Our Love. We come from Love. We return to Love. Love is all around. As we abide with Christ, we accept and conform to his love and we become the Love that is all around. This is what Jesus calls “eternal life” – life lived as God’s Love here and now. This is where John tells us about the bread and wine, Christ’s Body and Blood. As we abide with the Lord’s Communion, we become His Body, the Church. His Church is to be focused on accepting God’s Love, abiding in God’s Love, conforming to God’s love, so that we might Love on another, and Love our neighbors as God loves us and we Love one another.

We come from the Love of God. We will all return to the Love of God. And in this in-between time, we are to become that Love wherever we are, here and now. 

It was a former French Jesuit priest, Pierre Wolff, who introduced me to this summary of Eucharistic Theology. Pierre became an Episcopal priest, in part, so he could marry a nun, named Mary, who also became an Episcopalian. Mary Wolff was the warden of a men’s prison in Connecticut. Every Maundy Thursday, the day we read the story of Jesus washing people’s feet, she and Pierre would go through the prison washing the prisoner’s feet. The warden washed the prisoner’s feet. Those who could abide with that. Those who could accept the Love of God through Christ Jesus’s representatives, Mary and Pierre Wolff, who on that day were the living embodiment of the Love that is all around – of what it means to abide in Christ’s love. 

This is the essence, says Jesus, of the spiritual life. This is the essence of Eternal Life. Eternal Life is not some reward you somehow earn when it’s time to return to that place of love from whence we come. Eternal Life is life lived here and now as representatives, icons, of God’s love for all people, all creatures, and every living thing throughout the ever-expanding universe that somehow, in the beginning, banged itself into existence and continues to create and change, unfold and become more diverse despite all our efforts to try and hoard what we have and keep everything just the way it is. 

It is this that Jesus talks about in chapter six. He invites us to abide in him by eating his Body and drinking his blood. The very thought of this is too much for the crowd. They start drifting away. They mumble like their ancestors, “This is too hard. We just want more bread and fish. We just want you to open a bakery. We cannot fathom gnawing on your flesh and drinking your blood. 

And yet. And yet, his flesh is Love, and his blood is Love indeed. Like the manna of our ancestors, there is always enough love for each day. But if you gather too much and try to hoard it, it sours. Things go badly. Unless we find ways to give it away. To give love away. As the Canadian singer-songwriter Bruch Cockburn sings, “I’ve got this thing in my heart, I must give you today / it only lives if, you give it away.” Love only lives if you give it away. 

Give it all away, and we are assured that tomorrow there will be more love to gather and give away. And the next day and the next. Seems like Good News! But the people get angry with Jesus They just want a baker more than a Son of God who promises eternal life to all who choose to abide in His Love, the love of God that surrounds us at all times and in all places. The love that comes down and chooses to dwell among us. And so we sing: we come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. To remember who we are and whose we are. 

For five weeks every third year we read chapter six of John because this is the heart of the matter. The heart of all matter. The bread is love for the life of the world. To eat his flesh and drink his blood is to abide in God’s love, and become the Love that is all around, says the Son of God. Be the Love and then give it away. Tomorrow morning there will be more. Amen.

---

[i] John 6:56-69

[ii] John 13:1-15

[iii] John 15:4-5b, 8-9

Listen With The Ear of Your Heart Proper 14B

 Listen With The Ear of Your Heart

Some years ago, I represented the Diocese of Connecticut at a Stewardship conference held at the camp and conference center in North Carolina, Kanuga. I vividly recall being in a workshop, about what and led by whom I cannot remember. I do remember he held up a little book he had found in the Kanuga bookstore, Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, by John McQuiston II, an attorney from Memphis, TN. He read from the book The First Rule:

“Attend to these instructions. Listen with the heart and the mind, they are provided in a spirit of good will. These words are addressed to anyone who is willing to renounce the delusion that the meaning of life can be learned, whoever is ready to take up the greater weapon of fidelity to a way of life that transcends understanding. The first rule is simply this: live this life, and do whatever is done in a spirit of thanksgiving. Abandon attempts to security, they are futile, give up the search for wealth, it is demeaning, quit the search for salvation, it is selfish, and come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life with an attitude of thanksgiving will receive its full promise.” [i] 

I sat there stunned. It was as if the world stood still; as if I was the only person in the room; as if God had just spoken to my heart and my head at the same time. Thanksgiving. Eucharist in the Koine Greek of the New Testament. I went and purchased the book right away, and read it cover to cover. McQuiston had boiled down The Rule of St. Benedict making it accessible for just about anyone. I learned that a group of monastics had begged Benedict to be their leader, the head of their community. He put together a rule of life for the community. Which is what the author of the epistle called Ephesians does – lay out four essential core dimensions of life lived as the body of Christ: truthful speech “for we are neighbors of one another” who are made one body; do not let anger open you to sin and to those who try to mislead, deceive, and undermine the strength of the body of Christ; do not grieve the Holy Spirit with misbehavior for we are those marked and sealed as Christ’s own forever; forgiveness must be our fundamental practice “for God in Christ has forgiven you.” [ii] 

Those who had once begged Benedict to lead their community found it too hard to follow his Rule and attempted to poison him with the communion wine. He became aware of the plot, made the sign of the cross over the jug, broke it, forgave everyone, and sent them back to work – which work was to create a community of hospitality for any and all visitors who came to visit the monks. For you were once strangers in Egypt. We are all strangers in a strange land. 

Eventually, I set out to find a copy of The Rule itself, and learned about an annotated edition with commentary by Sister Joan Chittister, OSB. While vacationing in New Hampshire one summer, I ran about five miles first thing in the morning. Soon after, we all went to the local independent Morgan Hill Bookstore. It is small, but has a truly broad and well curated selection of books. They also have easy chairs around the store so one can sit and read a book before deciding to purchase it. Suddenly I became light-headed from my morning run, and sat down in one of those chairs, head between my knees for a few minutes. I was next to a set of bookshelves. When I sat up, I turned and looked at the books on the shelf, and there it was right in front of me: The Rule of Benedict: Insights For The Ages, annotated by Joan Chittister, OSB. I wasn’t looking for it, and yet it was right there! I turned to the Prologue to the Rule and read, “Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” Listen with the ear of your heart! “This is advice from one who loves you; welcome it and faithfully put it into practice…First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to God most earnestly to bring it to perfection. In God’s goodness, we are already counted as God’s own, and therefore we should never grieve the Holy One by our evil actions.” [iii] To which Sister Joan adds, “The person who prays for the presence of God is, ironically, already in the presence of God. The person who seeks God has already found God to some extent.” We are already counted as God’s own! We are already forgiven by God in Christ. We can become those who speak truth for we are neighbors of one another, and all who God brings to us. Marked and sealed as Christ’s own forever, we remain in the presence of God not allowing those outside the community of God’s love to deceive us and mislead us. 

Still talking to the 5,000 who had feasted on five barley loaves and two fish, Jesus says. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; … It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’” [iv] I had not looked for Always We Begin Again. It found me that day at Kanuga. Although I wanted to experience the sixth century Benedict’s Rule directly, it was the furthest thing from my mind that morning in the Morgan Hill Bookstore. And I surely had not counted on almost passing out, and then turn to see that the chair I sat in to recover was right next to Sister Joan Chittister’s annotated Rule of Saint Benedict. It truly was as if God had drawn me to that place, and that God was teaching me through Benedict and Sister Joan.

Listen with the ear of your heart. Just breathe that in. Let it come to us. Simply in seeking God’s presence in prayer is to be in the presence of God. There are no spiritual gymnastics to perform. No triple twists in tuck position needed to score forgiveness from God through Christ. We are already loved. We are already forgiven. We have already heard the truth with the ears of our hearts. Now here is the kicker: It’s our turn to do the same. Can we wrap our heads around what the unknown author of Ephesians is really saying? 

“Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Don’t imitate me, says the author of the epistle. Do not even imitate Christ. Be imitators of God. Or, as Jesus would say elsewhere, love God, love our neighbors, love our enemies, and in our spare time we are to be perfect as God is perfect! [v] That’s all. That’s it. We are made in the image of God. Live it! 

Make no mistake about it, we humans fall into terrible peril when we wrongly imitate God’s power, God’s knowledge, or God’s judgment. Benedict and Ephesians, like Christ himself, urges us to imitate a particular dimension of God, which is God’s love and forgiveness for all humankind, seen most astonishingly and most clearly in the fragrant offering of Christ’s sacrifice for the life of the world. The world. The whole world. As in “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything therein.” [vi] How different this world would be if we would only let that first verse that follows the 23^rd Psalm to penetrate the ears of our hearts so we might truly be imitators of God in Christ. Christ who is the bread of eternal life. Life lived with God here and now and forever.

---

[i] McQuiston II, John, Always We Begin Again (Morehouse, New York:1996/2011) p.17

[ii] Ephesians 4:25-5:2

[iii] Chittister, Joan, The Rule of Benedict (Crossroad, NY: 2004) p.19-21

[iv] John 6:35, 41-51

[v] Matthew 5:48

[vi] Psalm 24:1

Be Here Now Proper 13B

 Be Here Now

When we left chapter 6 of John’s gospel last week, the disciples had mysteriously reached Capernaum across the lake without Jesus in the boat. When those five thousand who had eaten their fill of bread and fish saw that the disciples were in Capernaum, we are told they all got into boats and crossed over to Capernaum themselves, “looking for Jesus.” [i] 

After previously identifying Jesus as a prophet, and wishing to make him their king, they now address him as rabbi: “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Like any good rabbi, rather than answer their question, he redirects the conversation significantly: “…you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” Back across the Sea of Galilee he fed them because they were hungry. Now Jesus is talking about a different kind of bread – bread that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. 

Eternal life and eternity. One needs to know just what Jesus is talking about, and it is easy to misunderstand. He is not talking simply about a future time, nor is he speaking of time after we die. As Frederick Buechner reminds us, “Eternity is not endless time, or the opposite of time. It is the essence of time itself. If you spin a pinwheel fast enough, then all its colors blend into a single color – white – which is the essence of all the colors of the spectrum combined. If you spin time fast enough, then time-past, time-present, and time-to-come all blend into a single timelessness or eternity, which is the essence of all times combined.” [ii]

 Another way of saying this might be that all time is one eternal “Now.” We tend to look at time as a series of unrepeatable events in which all things, including ourselves, pass away. But if we are lucky, we all have moments in which we find ourselves standing “outside of time,” at a wedding, or at a baptism, or in the midst of a disaster or an illness, or listening to music, reading a poem, when “we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even what life itself is all about, , and this glimpse of what ‘it’s all about” involves not just the present, but the past and the future too.” [iii] As when you are with someone you love, and there is little sense of the passage of time, and in the fullest sense possible you are having a “good time.” 

In biblical terms, and what Jesus is talking about, is more than bread. It is about being with God, which mystics often describe as having a good time with someone who loves you more than you have ever experienced or known before. The biblical term for such experiences, such glimpses of what our lives are all about, is Eternal Life. Another is, Heaven. 

The five thousand people who have chased Jesus across the lake to Capernaum think he is still talking about food – about literal bread. And they are thinking they must work for this bread. What must we do to do the work of God? Jesus replies, “Simply believe in him who he has sent?” Their response to this is to ask him to “perform a sign” so that they may see it and believe. Surely, they must be joking! He personally just fed them all with a few fish and a few loaves of bread, and they are demanding a sign? And they don’t stop there. They bring up Moses in the wilderness, and the manna that appeared daily. They even quote scripture: Exodus 16:2-4,9-15. 

There is a Yiddish word for this: chutzpah! Quoting scripture to the rabbi! Jesus, nevertheless, is patient, and just warming up as he conveys the essence of the life he calls them to embrace: “It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” It is subtle. Do we see what he is saying? It is the difference between “gave” and “gives.” It’s not about Moses. It’s not about the past. My father gives you the true bread from heaven. My father gives life to the world. Then, now, and forever. Eternity is now. Eternal life is now. Can you see it? Can you catch a glimpse of it? Are you experiencing it here and now? 

Thinking he is still speaking of bread they cry out, “Lord, give us this bread always!” This could be one of those moments in John’s telling of the story that concludes, “Jesus wept.” [iv] But John saves that for later when Jesus is told his dear friend Lazarus has died and been buried in a tomb for four days.  Instead, he replies, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Once again, here endeth the reading, despite the fact that he goes on to say a whole lot more. And the people begin to grumble and complain. But that is all for next week! 

For now, he is offering up himself as a gateway to eternal life – life lived with God, in the presence of God, yesterday, today and tomorrow. What does it mean to be “with God”? Buechner again: “It does not mean you have to be thinking about being with God, or feeling religious, or sitting in church, or saying your prayers, though it might mean any and all of these. It doesn’t even mean you have to believe in God...To say that a person is “with it” is slang for saying that whether he’s playing an electric guitar or just watching the clouds roll by, he’s so caught up in what he’s doing and so totally himself while he’s doing it that there’s none of him left over to be doing anything else with in the back of his head or out of the corner of his eye…If the It you are with when you’re really “with it” isn’t God, it’s enough like God to be his brother!” [v] 

Perhaps it is what Ephesians says is to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace… speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.” [vi] 

Eternal life. Building ourselves up in love. To grow up into Christ who is the bread of life. Jesus is calling them, calling us, to live into Eternal Life, here and now. To be here now, as some have said. To really hear what Jesus is calling us to be. Not to do, but to be. To be those people who catch a glimpse of Eternal Life, a glimpse of Heaven, which does not happen at the end of life, but is the beginning of life – a life in which we do not hunger and do not thirst as we grow into the fullness of Christ, speaking the truth in love. Leading a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called. In your mercy, Lord, give us this bread always. Amen.

---

[i] John 6:24-35

[ii] Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (Harper, San Francisco:1973) p.23

[iii] Ibid, Buechner

[iv] John 11:35

[v] Ibid, Buechner p.21

[vi] Ephesians 4:1-16