Thompson's Blog

It’s Not About Divorce
Mark 10:2-16

10:2 Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” 5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 10 Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” 13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” 16 And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

In an opposite way, this passage reminds me of that old saying about money. That whenever someone says over and over that it’s not about the money – it’s about the money. In the case of our scripture reading this morning, the Pharisees are asking Jesus about divorce, and Jesus has a lot to say about divorce, but I really don’t think this passage is about divorce.

If I thought the point of this passage was to heap condemnation on people who have suffered through the pain of divorce I wouldn’t touch it. If I thought Jesus’ intention was ramp up pressure on people to stay married at all cost I would skip over these verses. If I thought the enterprise of Christian living was simply a matter of following a very precise set of rules I would find another occupation. If I thought divorce disqualified people from full membership in the body of Christ I would have no hope for the church, but that’s not how I see it.

I doubt if there is any single issue I could bring up that would conjure up as much pain as this issue of divorce, and I hope you’ll forgive me for even mentioning the word. I know this passage seems to heap a new load of judgement onto that pain, but I don’t believe this was Jesus’ intent. He was issueing some strong judgement with his words, but the wrongness he was addressing was not really about divorce. Jesus spoke some words that seem hard to hear, but he was responding to a tricky question, and he had a shrewd reply.

The Pharisees weren’t questioning Jesus in hope of obtaining answers to questions that were actually troubling them. They weren’t really interested in knowing what he actually thought was legal or right – they were just interested in getting Jesus to say something that would be self incriminating to a significant group of people.

Apparently divorce was the subject of much debate in those days, and there were two main schools of thought on the issue. Both sides agreed that the Mosaic law allowed for a man to divorce his wife. There’s this passage in Deuteronomy that said a man could divorce his wife if he found something objectional about her. But there was quite a disagreement as to what justified a divorce. One group thought that a man could only divorce his wife if she engaged in an adulterous affair with another man, while the other group was willing to consider an objectionable dinner to be grounds for divorce.

The Pharisees were trying to set Jesus up as being at odds with one group or the other by having him interpret the intention of Moses’ law, but Jesus didn’t take the bait. He comes across as sounding like a member of the Taliban, but he wasn’t advocating intolerance. They asked him what was legal, and he gave them a legalistic answer. He sounds terribly hard-hearted, but I believe his true intention was to reveal the unrighteousness of the Pharisees.

What he did was to show that it was possible to be legally pure and spiritually wrong. In a sense what he said was that it wasn’t good enough to follow the letter of the law. The Pharisees based their righteousness on their ablility to abide by all the laws, and Jesus pointed out that it was possible to follow the law without being faithful to God.

By answering the way he did he exposed the unrighteousness of those who thought they were the most righteous. Jesus raised the bar impossibly high for those who sought to become worthy of God’s favor. Jesus basically said that if you are counting on being perfectly righteous there can’t be any compromise of God’s will – which is even harder than the Pharisees made it out to be. Jesus considered some of the laws in the Torah to be corrupt. He basically said Moses was pressured into making some adjustments to the law.

Jesus had bad news for those who based their relationship with God on their ability to abide by all the rules. The Pharisees lived very disciplined lives, and Jesus didn’t fault them for that, but he didn’t allow them to think they knew what it took to become perfectly righteous.

The Pharisees asked Jesus what was lawful and he told them that God’s law is even more demanding than Moses had portrayed it. If you want to be perfectly righteous there’s no room for divorce or any other form of behavior that is less than perfect. And I’m pretty sure that the One who can see into our hearts can recognize the ways in which we all engage in some form of idolatry, thievery, murder, adultery, coveting, Sabbath breaking, lying, blaspheming, or parental dishonoring. And that’s just the top ten ways to offend God.

Jesus has bad news for anyone who thinks they can meet all of God’s expectations. It’s not just the divorcees who are disqualified from perfect righteous – it’s hopeless for any of us who have ever harbored a desire for anything we don’t already have or a malicious thought about anyone.

The good news is that we don’t have to be perfectly righteous in order to be perfectly loved by God. Jesus wasn’t willing to compromise the holiness of the marriage covenant, but he didn’t lift up a perfectly righteous person as the example of someone who would enter into the kingdom of God. Jesus didn’t say that the person who has never done anything wrong is the person who is the most capable of receiving the kingdom of God. Jesus lifted up a child and said: Whoever doesn’t receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

And it wasn’t their innocence that he was recognizing. Children weren’t revered in those days in the way we revere children. In the rank of human value in that society, men were the most important, women were second class citizens, and children were on their way to becoming of value. I’m sure they loved their children, but they were the most invisible members of the community. They didn’t earn their keep. They weren’t in charge of anything. They hadn’t achieved anything. They were powerless, and the disciples didn’t consider them to be worthy of Jesus’ attention. They were preventing them from being brought to Jesus to be blessed, and it was in response to the way they were being disregarded that Jesus chose to highlight them as having the right qualification for entry in to the kingdom of God.

I think it was their lack of religious qualification that Jesus found so endearing about children, and that serves to undermine the way we often categorize who is most qualified for God’s favor.

Jesus clearly saw broken relationships as being contradictory to God’s desire for humanity, but that is not to say that people who divorce and remarry are unredeemable sinners. In fact people who fall short of maintaining the covenant of marriage generally undergo a pretty devastating experience. To experience divorce is to experience public failure, and I think it becomes a little harder for divorced people to engage in the kind of self-righteousness that Jesus found so offensive. I think it’s often easier for people who’s failures are put on display to develop the kind of attitude that Jesus found to be redeeming.

It’s so funny to think about who it was that recognized Jesus as the embodiment of God, and who it was that couldn’t stand him. The officially righteous people were totally put off by Jesus, while the losers and the lost couldn’t get enough of him.

Now I’m not saying that you need to ditch your spouse and develop a drug addiction if you want to get close to Jesus. I’m not suggesting that the best way to get to Jesus is through a personal train wreck. Living without regard for God or anyone else is detrimental to the developement of spiritual life, but I believe an inflated sense of righteousness is the greatest obstacle to an authentic relationship with God.

It isn’t our ability to live perfect lives that makes us candidates for life in the kingdom of God. The way we live our lives does make a difference, but it’s often our mistakes that enable us to become better candidates for living in relationship with God. Jesus didn’t point to the Pharisees as the one’s we need to emulate – he pointed to the children.

It’s not about being qualified. It’s about seeking to live in relationship with the one who loves us regardless of what we’ve done. Thanks be to God for those powerful experiences that enable us to see ourselves for who we are, and that put us in touch with the redeeming grace of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Eliminating the Obstacles to Life
Mark 9:38-52

9:38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40 Whoever is not against us is for us. 41 For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. 42 “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43 If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45 And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. 49 “For everyone will be salted with fire. 50 Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

We called my grandfather on my father’s side, Tom. His name was actually Thompson, but Thompson really only makes sense as a last name, which is what his mother’s last name was, so they called him Tom. My father’s name was also Thompson, but he went by Buddy. I got my mother’s maiden name for my middle name, which was Williams, so I’m not Thompson Bernard Murray, III. If that had been the case they might have called me Trey or Bernie or something. But my parents decided to call me by this whole awkward mouthful of a first name – Thompson. I’m not really complaining. It’s a name that has served me pretty well. It’s not easy to say, so people aren’t that quick to call on me, and that’s ok. It’s probably good not to get selected for things from people who just met you.

Names are powerful things. It’s not easy to understand how our names affect our lives, but I’m sure we are all conscious of how our names are used. There are people and issues to which we are willing to lend our names and other things that we don’t wish to be associated with our names. Just this last week I heard from a young man I knew as a student at UALR who is in Haiti trying to get his Visa renewed. I don’t really know how these things work, but he had been living in West Virginia for the last few years working on a Ph.D, and he had to go to an American Embassy in a nearby country to get recertified to be here.

He grew up in a west African nation that is predominantly Muslim, and I’m sure he is being heavily scrutinized. I knew him to be a person who came to this country in hope of getting away from the backward religious practices of his family, and I was happy to give him a good recommendation. Marcus had converted to Christianity, but that’s not the only reason I was willing to give my name to his cause. I knew him well enough to trust his intentions, and I want to be associated with people who have good intentions regardless of their faith.

You might say I gave him my name. I wouldn’t do that for anyone, but I was happy to give it to him. I don’t have a particularly powerful name, but I gave him what I have.

We see in today’s scripture a situation where some of Jesus’ disciples were unhappy with the way somebody was using Jesus’ name. They weren’t upset about what the man was doing with the name of Jesus, but they considered him to be an unauthorized user of his name. The disciples don’t come across very well in this passage. They seem to be grasping for a technicality to disqualify a rival of some kind.

I don’t know if they were thinking this was an intellectual property violation or someone who was operating without franchise. But Jesus considered it to be a petty complaint. Jesus was more disturbed by the thinking of his disciples than by the behavior of the unknown man who was using his name to do battle with demons. Jesus knew that there are times when bold action needs to be taken to eliminate a problem, but the disciples were focused on the wrong problem.

The problem wasn’t that an unknown person was using Jesus’ name, the problem was that the disciples were wanting to be in control of who used his powerful name. This raises all sorts of issues about who is authorized to do what in the name of Jesus. The recent visit of the Pope brings a lot of attention to what you might call religious franchise issues. And we United Methodists have our own issues in regard to ordination. The issue of pastoral authority is and has always been a large issue for the church. The fact that this issue came up among the first twelve disciples was a bad omen for the Christian movement. I think the good news is that what Jesus taught is so resilient it has withstood every obstacle it has created for itself.

But Jesus warned us to be careful in regard to how we treat one another. If we aren’t careful we can use his name improperly. Jesus had no tolerance for anyone who used his name in such a way that it would cause a little one to stumble. We don’t really know if Jesus was speaking of a young person or a person who was new to the faith – it really doesn’t matter. Jesus had no tolerance for the misuse of sacred power, and he had some very clear advice for people who were inclined to use good gifts for bad purposes. I quote: It would be better for you if a great millstone were tied around your neck and you were thrown in to the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble it would be better to cut it off and to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell …

This is some curious advice. He doesn’t say it would be better for the rest of us if bad people were eliminated either altogether or in part, but it would be better for that very person. This is some powerful advice. He is telling us that there isn’t anything as threatening to us as this possibility of using our good gifts in bad ways. He says it would be better for us to be dead than to live in a way that causes others to stumble. Some might argue that Jesus engaged in some hyperbole to make a point, but I’m inclined to believe that this is what he thought. Preserving our lives was not a big issue for Jesus. Preserving our souls was.

I can’t read this passage of scripture without thinking of my grandfather, Tom. I spent a lot of time around my grandfather when I was growing up. He liked to hunt and fish and he made sure I had those kinds of opportunities. He went to Sunday School and church every Sunday, and he would leave at 12 noon if the service was over or not. Tom didn’t suffer from ambivalence. He did what he thought he needed to do, and that was it. I don’t think my mother found that to be a particularly endearing quality, but that was who he was.

Tom had a small stroke when he was in his late seventies, and it left the little finger on his right hand sort of curled up. It wasn’t a huge impairment, but it got in the way when he went to shake hands with someone. He liked to shake hands with people, and it really bothered him that his little finger would be in the way of that. So he went to the clinic one afternoon and he asked his friend, Dr. Beaton, if he would cut his little finger off just beyond that first knuckle.

Dr. Beaton wouldn’t do it that day in his clinic, but he made him an appointment at the hospital and he actually had that procedure done not long after that.

Now this isn’t exactly what Jesus was talking about. This decision to have the end of his finger cut-off wasn’t a bold act of soul-preservation. It was more along the lines of cosmetic surgery, but I do appreciate my grandfather’s sense of decisiveness. I don’t think my grandfather thought of himself as someone who always did the right thing, but he didn’t hesitate to do what he thought he needed to do to get what he wanted to get.

I think Jesus wanted us to have that kind of clarity, and the thing he wanted us to be clear about is who it is we are seeking to serve. Are we using our knowledge and our trust in the name of Jesus Christ to do battle with the demonic forces that continue to abide in our world, or are we lingering around and getting in the way of the little ones who have heard God’s call and are seeking to find their way in to the kingdom of God.

The threat of eternal damnation in hell isn’t as visceral for most of us as it may have once been. I’m inclined to think the decline in church attendance is directly related to the decline of fear of hell. I can’t site a study to that effect, and I’m not really bemoaning this development. I don’t think we were so well served by that particular version of the faith, but I do believe we need some urgency to get it right.

And when I say we need some urgency to get it right I’m saying that we need deep desire to get life right. I don’t think we should live in fear of spending eternity in hell. But we should have some fear of spending years on earth living in ways that dulls our souls and encourages others to do the same. I think I should have some fear of investing my life in a manner that uses up a lot of resources and produces no fruit.

Tom created a little fish pond when I was in elementary school. He stocked it with some catfish and bream and bass. We would go out there and fish every now and then and sometimes we would catch something he called a Ricefield Slick. It was sort of a bream-looking fish, but he didn’t like those slicks, and he would tell me to throw them on the bank. I didn’t quite understand at the time the difference between fish that grew to be good fish to eat and fish that just consumed resources and produced offspring without ever becoming edible. Throwing those fish out of the water always seemed a little harsh to me, but I would do as I was told, and I sort of get it now.

And it makes me hope God doesn’t view me as a Ricefield Slick.

These lives that we’ve been given are precious gifts. We’ve been given access to some power and some abilities that can be utilized in some beautiful ways. Jesus ended up speaking of us as salt. Few people love salt as much as I do, but we all know that a little salt can make all the difference in the way something tastes. I’m the kind of person who thinks a little salt can go on anything and a lot of salt can go on other things, so I really resonate to this challenge to become as valuable as salt.

I don’t know how salt can lose it’s saltiness, but given how inexpensive good salt is I don’t think there could anything of less value than un-salty salt.

Jesus is calling us to be good salt – to be the people who enhance the flavor of life. Jesus wants us to use his powerful name well. He wants us to use the power of his name to do the work of sharing God’s redeeming love. We need to get out of the way of the little ones who are finding their way to the path of true life and we must get in the way of those evil forces that bring misery and destroy lives.

We are called to become truly alive. May we have the wisdom to cut-off or let go of whatever it is that is keeping us in the grip of death. There are large decisions for us to make and how we use our lives makes a world of difference. We can be as valuable as salt for the banquet or as disposable as a Ricefield Slick in a catfish pond.

I don’t mean to scare anyone, but I think Jesus wanted us to have some fear of squandering the opportunity we all have to resist death and to find life. Thanks be to God for this seemingly irresistible invitation. May our love for God overpower the love we have for unessential things and enable us to live with true abundance.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Ultimate Living
Mark 8:27-38

8:27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. 31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

I’m not getting much help from Jesus this morning when it comes to getting more people to show up for our worship service. He’s not providing me with a very good marketing tool. He’s not exactly telling us how to make America great again! The essence of this morning’s teaching from Jesus is to give up everything dear to you and make yourself available to die a miserable death. He says such suffering leads to true life, but it’s hard to hear that – the suffering part makes it hard to hear the resurrection part. Maybe I’m being a little negative. A more positive preacher probably wouldn’t summarize the teaching this harshly. But I don’t think this is far from what he had to say.

Peter didn’t like what he heard Jesus saying, and he tried to get Jesus to reconsider what he was about to do, and Jesus told Peter that he was speaking for Satan. The truth is that these are hard words for us to hear from the man we aspire to follow. In some ways it would have been nice for us if Peter and the rest of the disciples had been able to do as Jesus said and kept all of this a secret. We could go on thinking that the most important thing in life is to destroy our enemies and to accumulate personal wealth. Of course, we often forget what Jesus taught and we don’t seek to gain life by following Jesus down that difficult path of self-giving love.

The teaching of Jesus Christ is quite counter to the way we are conditioned by society to seek true life. I know that’s true, but it’s hard not to want to gain life in the usual way – to be rich and powerful. This is an oversimplification of the situation. I’m not sure exactly know how to live in our world without any regard for money or how self-giving we are called to be. It’s not simple, but I don’t think this is an excuse to not recognize the radically different way Jesus called for us to play this game of life.

Life isn’t a game, but games reflect life in some ways, and I think games can help us understand some things about life. I like games. There are some games I like to play and some games I like to watch. I wouldn’t say I’m the kind of person who likes to win at any cost – others might say that about me, but in my mind I play for fun. Of course it’s generally more fun to win, so yes, I play as hard as I can, but I don’t generally try to destroy my opponents. OK – there might be some opponents in some games that put me in touch with desire to destroy the opposition, but I try not to go that place. In all honesty I’m probably incredibly competitive and I like to win, but I mainly like to play. I love a good game.

Games are funny things. They can take your mind in different directions. Games can heighten your self-consciousness, but they can also allow you to totally lose your sense of self. They can carry you away so to speak. Playing a game can generate an extreme form of selfishness, but almost simultaneously a good game can cause you to forget about yourself.

Getting totally caught up in a game doesn’t happen to me easily. I generally stay in that place where my ego is straining to win and fearing the agony of defeat. I’m usually highly conscious of how I’m doing and where I stand. Sometimes my participation in a game concludes with my ego being stroked in a nice way, but most of the time games provide me with good lessons on the value of humility. Of course I can take great pride in the extent of my humility. I’m really good at humility. I’ve had a lot of experience with humility.

But there is one game that always put me in that nice mindset of playing really hard and getting lost in the game. The game is called Ultimate Frisbee, and it’s a beautiful game. I’m sure some of you know how to play the game, but for those of you who had the misfortune of growing up prior to the arrival of the Frisbee or are otherwise unfamiliar with the game I’ll give you a brief description of how you play the game.

You have two teams – with seven being the optimum number of players on each side, and you play on a field that’s a little shorter and narrower than a football field. Like all good games you can adapt it to whatever size field you’ve got and play with as many people as you have on hand, but seven on a side on about a seventy yard field is the ultimate arrangement so to speak. To start the game, each team lines up on their goal line and one team throws the Frisbee to the other team. That team takes the Frisbee and tries to advance down the field by throwing it to each other. You can’t run with it. You run to catch it, but as soon as you catch it you’ve got to stop. If you drop it or it gets intercepted the play immediately goes in the other direction and you score by catching the Frisbee behind the other team’s goal line.

I love this game, but I can’t really play it any more. My 57 year-old back has become really fragile, and I would end up in rehab at Lindley’s if I got caught up in a game, but given the opportunity it would be hard for me not to forget about the consequences and play like my life depended on it.

I’m not saying I was ever a great Ultimate player, but it probably is my best game. I spent many hours on the lawn in front of Old Main playing this game, and there was a time when people liked having me on their team – not that I was keeping score or anything.

I loved playing this game. And it had a spirit about it that I thoroughly enjoyed. Players were to call their own fouls – even in tournaments, and according to the rules, players were simply to resolve their disputes by remembering that it is a joy to play the game. It wasn’t hard for me to remember this rule, and I was a good player because I did remember what we were out to do – which was to play hard and to play fair.

It’s funny how the beauty of this game and my aptitude for playing it continues to grow with the years since I last played it, but in all honesty it was a game that helped me understand what it means to lose yourself. When you love playing something you launch yourself out there without fully considering all the consequences.

I’m not wanting to trivialize the words of Jesus by comparing them to a game, but I do think a good game can help us understand what Jesus was inviting us to do. On some level, Jesus reminds me of a coach who was needing his players to understand a whole new game plan. The disciples knew they were going to Jerusalem to disrupt the godless enterprise that ruled the people of Israel, but Peter couldn’t believe how Jesus said he was going to do it.

When the disciples told Jesus what glorious things people were saying about him I think they thought he would have been pleased to know that he was being compared to all the key people in Israel’s history. And Peter probably thought Jesus would have been impressed to hear him say that he considered him to be the messiah, but if he was, he didn’t react in the manner that Peter expected.

Jesus may have been pleased to hear Peter call him the messiah, but Jesus wasn’t going to play the role of messiah in the manner that everyone expected. Jesus wasn’t playing the game of life in the conventional manner, and he told his disciples that they needed to play it differently as well if they wanted to join him in victory.

You’re probably tired of me playing around with this game metaphor, but if I quit playing around with the metaphor I’ll have to get specific about the way this metaphor translates into actual life. Losing life in order to gain life wasn’t just a metaphor for Jesus. For him, that was the actual consequence of resisting the unholy alliance of the religious and secular leaders who were in control of that small corner of the world at the time.

People knew that the collaboration between Judaism and the Roman government was a godless alliance, so it was no surprise that Jesus would go to Jerusalem to confront it, but Peter didn’t expect Jesus to resist it by offering his life. This must have felt a lot like defeat to Peter because he didn’t yet understand the power of resurrection – in fact Peter doesn’t even seem to hear Jesus say he would be resurrected three days after his death.

Resurrection isn’t an easy concept for any of us and this may have a lot to do with the fact that in order to embrace resurrection we have to accept death, and we don’t want to make room for death in our lives – not even in a metaphorical sense. We are much more inclined to pursue strategies that will bring us more of what we think of as the good life now.

We don’t want to die miserable deaths (even metaphorically) at the hand of our adversaries, but Jesus knew that losing life for the right thing is better than grabbing life in the wrong way. Jesus trusted God to establish the final score, and this is a hard thing for us to accept.

I’m not sure what ramifications this story has on each of us as individuals and our church as a whole. As I already indicated, we live in an incredibly complex society, and I don’t know how you navigate it without any resources or personal survival skills, but what I hear Jesus saying is that we need to let go of the normal rules if we want abundant life.

Peter didn’t think Jesus knew what he was doing, and your neighbors may think the same about you if you truly fall in line behind Jesus, but Jesus did know what he was doing. Peter didn’t really get it at first and your neighbors probably won’t either. Following Jesus is a scandalous way to live because it may well cause you to look like a loser, but things like that don’t matter to people who follow Jesus.

It’s a strange game that we have been invited to play. There’s only one rule in this game, and that rule is to live with love in your heart for God and your neighbor. To follow Jesus is not to be bound by the expectations of our society but to live a life that’s guided by the Holy Spirit and there’s just no telling where that will take you.

Jesus didn’t want anyone to be surprised by the difficulty of this game, but there’s no limit to the abundance of life that we can experience if we will allow ourselves to get caught up in this ultimate endeavor.

It’s the ultimate challenge. It offers the ultimate reward.
Thanks be to God for this ultimate invitation.
Amen.

The Turbulent Journey to Peace
Mark 7:24-37

If I were to give you a thumbnail sketch of my faith journey there would be a significant dividing line between the way I viewed God before I met Lewis Chesser and after I met Lewis. Just as world history is divided between BC and AD, I guess I can divide my theological life in to BL & AL — Before Lewis and After Lewis. Sometimes I want to blame him for the way he altered the course of my life, but on most days I’m grateful to Lewis for the role he played in saving my soul.

Now that’s a powerful phrase I’m throwing out this morning. You might think I’m sounding a little like a Southern Baptist by claiming that my soul has been saved. This might be encouraging to some of you and frightening to others, but the truth is I’m not claiming salvation in the way it’s often portrayed. I would say the traditional understanding of salvation is to simply believe your soul is going to heaven instead of hell when you die, and that’s probably how I understood things before I encountered Lewis, but I don’t see it that way any more.

You might say I’m optimistic about what happens to all of us when we die. There may well be some reckoning involved in the process. Coming to Jesus in the afterlife will probably be more pleasant for some people than for others – I’m not privy to those details, but I’ve come to believe that salvation is something we can experience on this side of death. I fully trust that our relationship with God extends beyond death, but I believe that God can bring us some of that peace that passeth all understanding while we’re still hiking around on earth, and that’s what I think of as salvation.

I think what we see in these two stories this morning are portrayals of salvation experiences. Both of these stories illustrate the way in which Jesus brought some peace in to the lives of some people who were feeling pretty torn up. There are some strange twists to these stories – as is often the case when the spirit of God comes in to the house, but normal rules don’t apply when God is involved. These stories aren’t particularly pretty, but they end well, and I think that can always be the case when we are open to the various ways in which God works with us to bring salvation and peace in to our lives.

I wasn’t healed as quickly as was the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman or the man from the region of Tyre, but I feel like I experienced a similar level of life transformation through my involvement with the Wesley Foundation while I attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Lewis Chesser was the director of that campus ministry program while I was there, and as I say, it was a life-altering experience. I wasn’t a bad person prior to meeting Lewis. In fact you might say I was a more well-behaved person before I got involved in that community. Fear of spending eternity in hell can keep you out of some trouble, but I was having a hard time being good enough to keep my perceived notion God happy.

I transferred from Hendrix to the U of A as a sophomore. I tell people that I don’t think I had a problem with Hendrix – I had a problem being a freshman in college. I just didn’t like my freshman year, and I needed to do something different, so I went to the U of A in hope of becoming a Mechanical Engineer. I didn’t really know what Mechanical Engineers did, but I was interested in solar technology, and someone said I should go in to Mechanical Engineering, so that’s what I set off to do.

The Education Director, Emily Cockrill, at First United Methodist Church in Wynne knew Lewis from Annual Conference business, and she said I should go by the Wesley Foundation when I got to Fayetteville, and I did. I had an immediate connection with Lewis because he commuted on a bicycle, and I was a committed bicycle rider in those days. I also got to know some of the people who came around there. There was a handful of people who lived in an old house on the Wesley Foundation property – it was called the Pierce House, but other people often dropped by there, and it was an interesting assortment of people. It’s not easy to describe what that community was like, but it might best be described as a sociological refugee camp. There were some starving artists & musicians, some recovering addicts, some practicing addicts, some ping-pong enthusiasts, some leftover hippies, some poets, some people who were restarting their lives after failed marriages or careers, and a few lost children like myself.

But all of these people were never assembled at the same time. The program at the Wesley Foundation didn’t involve large numbers of people. It was sort of a struggling institution on some level, but I can testify that it was a place that touched a good number of people in a really good way. It probably put-off a good number of people as well, but I can tell you it provided me with the soul-soothing medicine that I needed.

I dropped by several times during that first fall semester, and I would show up on Sunday mornings for the worship service. I probably met the criteria for being clinically depressed, but this was 1977 and you didn’t really talk about such things. I don’t think my brain chemistry was off – I just didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, and I felt alienated from life. I had navigated high school well, but I felt lost when I went to college. I felt like God and everyone else was waiting for me to get with the program, and I didn’t know what program to get with. I was carrying around some deep despair.

But I would show up at the Wesley Foundation for tea and conversation pretty regularly and Lewis asked me if I would show up on a Saturday to help bring down a dead tree that was on the property. The Wesley Foundation property was on the corner of Leverett and Maple St. (right across Leverett from the Kappa house for those of you who are familiar with the campus), and this tree was leaning toward Maple St., but Lewis thought that we could put a rope high up in the tree and a bunch of us could pull it in to an open area away from the street as he made the cut.

I think there were probably about 6 of us that showed up to do the pulling that morning. Lewis had the chainsaw. He started cutting and as he got close to what he considered the critical point he gave us the signal to start pulling. We started pulling and Lewis kept cutting until the saw got in a bind and quit. We pulled as hard as we could for as long as we could, but
nothing happened.

The saw was stuck in the tree. The tree was still standing, and we were just standing there with a limp rope in our hands. But we didn’t stand there long before we heard the distinct crack of a tree that was about to fall down. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard such a crack, but it’s a powerful sound. It’s not that loud – at first. It’s a small sound, but it has a lot of meaning to it. It means a few tons of wood is about to hit the ground.

This is one of those moments that has stuck with me for a long time. Somebody had the good sense to rush out and stop the one car that was coming down Maple. My soon-to-become best friend, David, said something that you can’t repeat in church, and I just stood there and watched as this huge tree came down and spilled into the road. It was only the top limbs that hit the road. It wouldn’t have killed an unsuspecting driver, but insurance companies and lawyers would have been involved.

That was the event that sealed my relationship with the Wesley Foundation and with Lewis. It might have driven other people away, but I don’t think I had ever been so involved in such a failed operation, and it was somehow compelling to me.

The transformation of my understanding of God didn’t happen quickly and my despair didn’t evaporate immediately, but through the conversation, the preaching, and the response to the preaching that went on around there my understanding of God dramatically shifted. I came to see God as less of a judge and more as a compassionate healer. I came to let go of my sense of trying to be deserving of God’s love and to accept that God loves us regardless of who we are and what’s wrong with us.

I think that’s the essence of these stories that Mark tells us about this tenacious Syrophoenician woman and the disabled man from Tyre. The way Jesus responds to this woman sort of makes you wonder what Jesus was thinking, and in all honesty I don’t know why Jesus said what he did. It seems like he could have been nicer about the whole thing, but what it ends up highlighting is not just the universal nature of God’s love – it reveals the way in which it’s often our brokenness that moves us to seek the source of salvation. This woman was not put-off by the harsh words of Jesus because she knew what she needed and she was relentless in her effort. There are no boundaries to the love of God, but that doesn’t mean we have easy access to it. Some tenacity may be required.

I don’t take credit for my own salvation. I really don’t even give Lewis credit for the healing of my despair and the salvation of my soul, but he did some good pointing to where I could find it. Lewis sort of went out of his way to not portray himself as the one to be revered. He didn’t intend this, but by dropping that tree in the opposite direction of where he wanted it to go Lewis revealed himself to be significantly less than perfect, and somehow that spoke to me in a good way.

I like to think that the subtle but profound crack that I heard just before that tree came down was also the sound of my own unfortunate image of God starting to crack and come down. I know I don’t have a perfect understanding of God, but through the ministry of the Wesley Foundation I was led to believe that I’m perfectly understood and loved anyway. And that’s what salvation looks like to me. I’m not free from despair, but it’s more of an occasional distraction than my orientation point. I no longer trust myself to get everything right, but I feel like I can continue to grow in my relationship with the One who does.

I didn’t become a Mechanical Engineer while I was in Fayetteville, but I did become a more devoted follower of Jesus Christ, and now you might say I’m employed by him. I might not be one of his best salespeople. I never was that good at sales, but I love Jesus. He can spit, touch my tongue and stick his fingers in my ears anytime. I feel that he provided me with new life, I’m grateful to have it, and I want more of it.

I believe that regardless of where we are or what’s wrong with us there is this opportunity for new life. It was hard for some people to see that God was fully present in the life of Jesus Christ, but others couldn’t be persuaded otherwise – even by Jesus himself. Jesus isn’t necessarily who we think he is, but he can provide us with what we need. I thank God for that, and I thank God for the new possibilities that exist for us all as we grow in our knowledge and understanding of this man who fully embodied the love of God. Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ and for the way in which he continues to live among us! Amen.

When Cleanliness Becomes Godlessness
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

7:1 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5 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?” 6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ 8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” 14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” 21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

This morning’s passage presents a situation in which I’m almost inclined to side with the Pharisees. It’s always a good idea to wash your hands before you eat! But what we have here isn’t a debate about the value of proper hygiene. What we have here is a disagreement about proper religious protocol – about what it is that offends or pleases God.

I’ve recently preached from the 6th Chapter of John, which is an exhaustive examination of Jesus as the bread of life. You might say John portrays Jesus as something good to ingest, and today we’re presented with another teaching that involves eating, but it’s a converse message. Mark reveals the way in which Jesus exposed what it is that really makes us sick.

Jesus was confronted by the leaders of the Jewish community because his disciples weren’t going by the rules that they revered. The Pharisees defined faithfulness to God as adherence to certain religious rules and practices, and you were only considered to be ritually clean if you observed all of the religious ordinances. Being ritually clean was a big thing within that community, because people who were considered to be unclean or defiled weren’t allowed to go into the Temple or the village synagogues.

And being kept out of these institutions was a much bigger thing than being told you can’t step into the sanctuary. Being told to stay home from church would probably feel like a reward to some people, but being kept out of the Temple or the synagogue was a large problem for members of the Jewish community. It was to be told they were banned from the center of their community.

I think the equivalent experience for us would be to be banned from Wal-Mart. I’m not saying you should be showing up at Wal-Mart on a regular basis, but my guess is that most of us do. It’s sort of become the place you go to get what you need, and that’s the role the Temple played in Jerusalem and the synagogues played in Jewish villages. We don’t actually have an equivalent place because we don’t live in a community that is as homogenous as these Jewish villages were, but I think we can all imagine what it would feel like to be banned from an essential place, and such banning was a real possibility for people who were living in the days of Jesus.

Being officially defiled was an undesirable state to be in, but it wasn’t a permanent condition. At least it didn’t have to be. There were rituals for unclean people to follow in order to be readmitted into the community, and that was probably what the Pharisees thought Jesus’ disciples needed to undergo, but Jesus challenged the system. He explained that it was the thinking of the Pharisees that needed to undergo some transformation.

This was a dangerous thing to do. It was dangerous because the Pharisees saw themselves as the protectors of righteousness. They didn’t think their belief system needed to be corrected — they just thought it needed to be properly observed.

And of course we all know that people in powerful positions don’t like to have their faults exposed. Actually I don’t guess any of us like to have our faults exposed, but people in powerful positions often have the means to keep their bad ideas in place.

This controversy over hand-washing reminds me of the story of Ignaz Semmelweiss, who revealed the value of hand-washing to the physicians at General Hospital in Vienna, Austria in 1846. It’s an interesting and a tragic story. There were two maternity wards in this hospital. One was staffed by doctors and medical students, and the other one was staffed by midwives. And the staggering fact was that the death-rate for the mothers was five times higher in the doctors ward than it was in the midwives ward. Dr. Semmelweiss was troubled by this discrepancy, and he embarked upon an investigation to discover the cause.

He had a number of incorrect theories, but he finally determined that one of the factors that was different on the doctor’s side was that many of the doctors were engaged in research on cadavers in the basement of the hospital and they would often go from their laboratories to the delivery rooms without proper washing. This was prior to our understanding of microbiology, but he developed a new protocol for hand-washing prior to entering the delivery room, and this changed everything.

Unfortunately there were doctors on the staff who refused to believe that they were responsible for the high death rate, and instead of accepting his theory as the truth they fired him. Dr. Semmelweiss was a better scientist than he was a politician, and instead of lobbying effectively for change he totally alienated himself from the medical community, and they actually had him committed to an insane asylum, and that is where he died from an untreated infection in a wound that was inflicted upon him upon arrival.

It wasn’t long after that that the truth of his finding was pretty much universally accepted, but it happened slower than it should have because of the arrogance of the established leaders of that community.

Systems don’t like to get challenged. Some systems are worse than others, but no system reacts well to change. You might say the nature of a system is to maintain the way it works, and any kind of change is perceived as threat. I think we probably all appreciate the resistance we have to change, and I think it’s probably good for all of us to remember the first message Jesus ever delivered – the first thing he called for people to do after he had been baptized by John the Baptist was to repent and believe in the good news! And to repent is to change your mind.

I certainly don’t like to think that Jesus discouraged hand-washing, nor do I think Jesus was uniformly disrespectful of his elders, but Jesus clearly challenged the conventional wisdom of his day about what was pleasing to God and what it took to become defiled.

I guess one of the things I like about being a United Methodist is that we aren’t too quick to define who is in and who is out of God’s favor, although I’m sure we all harbor our own ideas about that. Some would say that’s the problem with the United Methodist Church – that we don’t define what it takes to be saved as clearly as we aught, but I’m inclined to think that it’s never good to define that which is essentially mysterious in too narrow of a manner. It’s easy to become overly attached to what we believe and to become less attached to the One in whom we believe.

There was a time in my life when I was much clearer about what God expected of me and everyone else. There was a period of time in my life when I thought I knew all the rules, and I pretty much followed them. I wasn’t a very happy person, but I was pretty clear about what it meant to be Christian. That was before I began to read what Jesus actually said and did. And that was before I actually came to know some people who I previously considered to be out of bounds.

Some people within the broad community of Christianity are real clear about what God expects. For some people there is no doubt about what’s acceptable and what’s not, and who’s going to heaven and who’s not. Some would say this clearly indicates where I’ll be going when I die, and that it doesn’t bode well for my eternal soul, but that’s just not how I see it.

I do believe there is a high level of expectation for those of us who aspire to follow Jesus, and the expectation is for us to be guided by the rule of love. I don’t think there’s anything harder to do than to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Jesus said it’s a narrow path that leads to eternal life, and I believe that, but it isn’t a well-marked path. It’s a path we have to discover through a life of diligent prayer, of intentional study, and through acts of self-giving love for other people.

Jesus challenged the well-established religious beliefs and protocols of his day, and I have no doubt he does the same for us. It’s not that we shouldn’t have firm convictions about things, but we should never allow our convictions to override our love for the truth, and I believe it’s our relationship with the living Christ that will continue to lead us in to the truth.

I mentioned in my first sermon here that I took a long bicycle trip in May of 2014. I went from Little Rock to the coast of South Carolina, and I basically followed a route that was determined by Google maps. I’m going to do a slide show of my trip after church one Sunday in October, which I’m pretty excited to do because it was a such a good experience for me. I’ll tell you all about it then, but the route I followed was largely defined by the bicycle route option on Google maps. It steered me wrong a few times by suggesting I follow roads that weren’t paved, but for the most part it put me on non-interstate highways and bicycle friendly roads.

One really interesting routing experience I had was when I was in a rural area of northern Alabama. It was sort of a rainy morning and I had my phone tucked away in my handlebar bag, and I was listening to navigation instructions on my earphones. The google-map-woman’s voice came on and told me to take a right which steered me in to the gravel parking lot of this sports complex outside of a small town and then it told me to head east 300 feet. I thought the Google-map-woman had lost her mind because it directed me to go toward a tree lined ditch, but I went over there, and I saw there was a small bridge going over that ditch. That still seemed crazy, but I went over it and what I discovered on the other side of the ditch was a paved bicycle trail that went all the way in to Atlanta. It was an old railroad bed that they had turned in to a bicycle trail and it was the best bicycling environment you could ask for.

This wasn’t a particularly Christian experience, but I think it illustrates what it looks like to follow Christ. When we follow Christ I believe we are lead to step in to places that are outside of the boundaries that we normally construct for what life is supposed to look like and where faith is supposed to take us. I don’t think it’s unusual for us to find ourselves in places that seem far from where we think we should be – only to discover that there’s a small bridge that leads us to a place that opens up a whole new way of living.

It’s not always so clear and so gratifying, but I don’t think it’s unusual for genuine faith in Christ to take us to places that challenge our beliefs and expand our understanding of what it means to be a faithful disciple. It’s a narrow path, and it’s hard to stay on the path, but it’s the path that leads to true life. It’s not a predictable and well-defined journey. It’s a challenging journey and joyful journey. This journey is not guided by rules – it’s guided by the Holy Spirit, and thanks be to God for that!
Amen.

The Uniform of Faith
Ephesians: 6:10-20

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14 Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. 15 As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 16 With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints. 19 Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.

This passage of scripture challenges me to examine my view of reality, but it also makes perfect sense to me. I love this image of suiting up properly for the work of God, and it makes me think about what it is that I’m up against.

The truth is that I have a much clearer image of God than I do of the devil. I have a lot to say about who God is, but in all honesty I don’t pretend to know that much about God. I know that God is far bigger than my mind can comprehend, but I am in love with my image of God. I may be wrong about how I see God, but I understand God to be perfectly benevolent. I believe that God loves and understands each of us so perfectly that there’s nothing any of us can do to prevent God from loving us. I’m not saying I believe God loves everything we do, but I believe God loves us unconditionally, and I think my image of God is consistent with the way in which Jesus portrayed God. Jesus didn’t just love the people who deserved to be loved. He loved his friends and his enemies. He loved properly religious people, and he loved outrageously sinful people.

I like to think that my image of God is well informed by what Jesus did and taught, but I also know that my concept of God is largely informed by the way I was raised and the good fortune that has come my way in life. I was born to loving parents, and in to a community that made me feel welcome in the world. I’m not saying that my life has been one easy step after the other, but I’ve never felt assaulted by evil. This could change tomorrow, but I think it’s accurate to say that I’ve experienced more hospitality in my life than hostility, and I think this has had an impact on my theology.

I think these factors have come together to provide me with a more fully developed understanding of God than I have of the presence of evil, and for that reason it’s a challenge for me to think about what it means to be properly equipped to protect myself from the wiles of the devil. This is not to say that I have no idea how bad this world can be or how well I can cooperate with the presence of evil. I don’t consider myself to be a Pollyanna – I know that bad things happen and that people do horrific things.

While I trust that the love of God is larger than any other agenda in the universe, I also believe that evil is insidiously present in every nook and cranny of this world. I can think of evil as being a little bit like the mosquitos around here which are lurking everywhere. I don’t necessarily feel as assaulted by evil as I do by the mosquitos, but I know I am in need of deliverance from both! Jesus taught us to pray for deliverance from temptation and evil, and I don’t doubt that I need it. I know myself to be a weak and self-serving schemer who is a few short steps away from seeking any form of ungodly good and service available. I think it was Mark Twain who said he could resist anything but temptation, and I think he was speaking for most of us when he said that.

As I say, I believe God loves us all unconditionally, but I know we all create our own challenges to the love of God. I also believe there are things we can do to diminish those challenges and to grow in our relationship with God. I fully embrace this wisdom of Paul who wrote this letter to encourage the people of Ephesus and the rest of us to protect ourselves from the particular ways in which we are vulnerable to the manifestation of evil.

While I don’t unquestionably accept everything that Paul is credited with writing as being the absolute truth or perfectly sound teaching, I do trust these words that we are looking at this morning. These aren’t just lofty and poetic phrases emanating from a man who was sitting at a desk in a serene location. That’s what I do, and while I don’t think I’m leading anyone astray with the things I say, I don’t think I write with the same authority that Paul had as he sat in a grimy cell – imprisoned for sharing his belief that God was made known in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul had encountered Christ in such a powerful way the threat of imprisonment was overshadowed by his passion to share what he had experienced and what he believed.

Paul was suffering for what he believed – which adds a lot of credibility to what he was saying. And what I understand him to be saying is that we need to be on guard against the enemies of the spirit more than we need to protect ourselves from threats to our physical wellbeing. Paul was in a physically vulnerable situation, but it wasn’t for his flesh that he was concerned. Paul didn’t let the physically harsh circumstance he was in distract him from the thing that was truly threatening to him – which was of a spiritual nature. Paul had the wisdom to see beyond the immediate threats to his body and remain focused on the powers and principalities that were behind those threats.

His battle was not with the individuals who had put him in prison. Paul recognized that his struggle was with the spiritual forces of evil that were behind the people who abused him and placed him in prison. He knew that he needed to guard himself so that he could maintain love in his heart while he was in a very hateful situation.

When I think of what this means for me, what strikes me is the vast difference between the circumstances that Paul was in and what the Ephesians were facing, and the situation in which I find myself living. What I’m thinking is that I need to be as vigilant in my resistance to the evil powers that are behind the surface of the world in which I live as Paul was to those powers that were lurking behind the surface of his world. I don’t believe that we live in a world that is less threatened by the spiritual forces of evil. I think it’s probably just harder for us to see the ways in which we cooperate with those powers that are at work in this world that do harm to our souls.

I don’t want to overstate the case of how active the evil powers are at work in our neighborhood. I’m honestly very grateful to live in a place where I don’t feel threatened on a daily basis by people who are motivated to set of bombs or to carry out other forms of mass violence. I wouldn’t trade the problematic world in which I live for the one that Paul lived in or the world in which so many others are living in today. I think it would be hard for me not to be hateful if I had family members injured, tortured, or killed by a rival religious sect or tribe. I don’t know how well my soul would be doing if I lived in a place without adequate food, water, medicine or shelter. I’m might not have such a benevolent image of God if I lived in a place that was wracked by war, famine, or industrial waste. I’m not proud to say this, but it’s probably true.

I just don’t know how to reconcile these things, but Paul provides some testimony that is important for me to hear. I hear him saying that we should always do what we can to protect our souls. We need to don the equipment of faith that will enable us to resist the evil powers that are always lurking behind the façade of life.

As a person who hardly ever goes outside without putting on my trusty Tilley hat that is designed to protect my vulnerable head from those invisible forces that can do harm to my skin, I find Paul’s words to be compelling. I’ve never been a soldier, so I don’t have full appreciation for the way it feels to put on equipment that’s designed to protect you in battle, but I like to be properly protected. There aren’t many days of the year when I don’t wear boots of some kind, and I don’t wear shorts very often. Part of that is motivated by vanity, but I also just feel more protected when I’m wearing long pants. And I’m pretty quick to put on a back brace when I’m going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I’m pretty mindful of protecting my flesh, and Paul has pointed out that I need to be even more mindful of protecting my soul. I think this probably means slightly different things to all of us, but what is true for us all is that we need to pay attention to how we spend our time, to what that we give our attention, and to where we invest our resources. What is it that we are feeding within ourselves? And what are we encouraging to happen in our community and beyond? I think Paul would say that such things are reflections of how well we are resisting or cooperating with the evil powers that are behind the surface of this world.

We live in a very mysterious world. I don’t get it in so many ways. Evil is out there, but so is God. I trust that God’s love will prevail in this world, and I pray that we will all do all that we can to cooperate with the love of God in whatever way we can for as long as we can. I think John Wesley said something to this effect about 250 years ago. He is credited with saying: Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times that you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can. And I think this remains to be good instruction for us. This world is torn in many ways by insidiously evil agendas, and if we don’t intentionally seek to do the good we can do we may well find ourselves supporting the enemies of God and contributing to the deterioration of our souls.

Of course the best form of protection comes to us in the presence of the Holy Spirit, who convicts us of our sin when we are going in the wrong direction, and who enables us to see what we can do to resist evil and to stand with God.

Thanks be to God for the opportunity we all have to live our lives in relationship with God and in opposition to the evil powers of this world. We all abide in God’s world, and we are all invited to be God’s people.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Serving Up Jesus
John 6:51-58

51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 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.”

Before I was a preacher I was a cook. I first studied the art of cooking under the instruction of my mother, who was a good cook. We ate well at my house when I was growing up, and I didn’t want to be as helpless in the kitchen as my father was. He could fix a fine fried-egg sandwich, but that was about the only thing I ever knew him to cook. I was really interested in learning about food preparation, and I actually took a cooking class one semester at the Univ. of Arkansas. It was in the Home Economics Department and it was called Foods For Non-Majors. I remember well that I was one of two male students in the class. It wasn’t hard for me to stand out in that class, but it wasn’t always for the right reasons.

And then I got a job working in the kitchen at Hugo’s. If you’ve spent any time in Fayetteville since the mid-seventies it’s likely you’ve eaten there. I bet I could go in that kitchen right now and make a plate of Macho Nachos. It was nice to have some extra money, but mainly I liked the food there, and I wanted the experience of working in a commercial kitchen. I actually enjoyed the work, but I never advanced beyond the status of a prep-cook and dish-washer. I wasn’t trained to work at the grill – I never really aspired to have that level of responsibility there.

I had a hard time honing in on what I wanted to focus upon when I was an undergraduate, and at the prompting of some friends who were going to step out of college for a spring semester and go work in Vail, CO, I decided to join them. I got out there and began looking for work, and I found a job at the Hong Kong Café. It was a great little Chinese Restaurant right at the base of Vail Mountain, and I loved working there. It was owned by a man who had spent time deployed in Viet Nam, and he had grown to love the food while he was over there. When he got back to the United States he lived in San Francisco and he learned how to run a Chinese style of restaurant there.

There wasn’t an Asian person in this kitchen in Vail, but we cooked traditional Chinese food on these large woks, and it was a very popular restaurant. We were only open in the evenings, but the days were filled with prep-work. Some days I worked during the day chopping vegetables and meat and preparing egg rolls and wontons, and other days I worked in the evenings washing dishes, frying egg rolls and wontons, and learning how to prepare the various dishes we made. They wanted everyone in the kitchen to know how to do everything, and I honestly loved working there. By the time the snow melted in the spring and my internal compass said it was time for me to return to Arkansas I had learned everything about that kitchen. The owner actually invited me to help him establish a new restaurant in San Diego, but I had had my western adventure and I was ready to come back to Arkansas.

I returned to Wynne that summer where I worked for a landscape company during one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and that was an experience that motivated me to return to college. As I closed in on my senior year with a very general degree that basically qualified me to go to graduate school or learn a trade, I was honestly torn between the option of going to some kind of cooking school or going to seminary.

You’ll hear more about my young adult angst and vocational confusion than you want to know in sermons to come. I won’t try to fill you in on all of those odd details this morning, but what I want you to understand is how close I came to being a guy who sought to serve fine food on Saturday night instead of tasty morsels of truth on Sunday morning. And while it may appear that I was in close kinship with Jethro Bodine, the idiotic nephew of Jed Clampitt on The Beverly Hillbillies, who couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a fry cook or a brain surgeon – I think there was a significant connection between the two vocational directions I seriously considered.

And this morning’s scripture lesson is making this connection for me. I’ve never really thought about this job of preaching as being so close to the work of a chef until I began to consider what Jesus was saying in this morning’s passage. What I’m thinking is that as a follower of Jesus Christ, and as an advocate for Christian discipleship I am to feed on Jesus and I am to serve him to others.

Now in some ways this passage is a bit more graphic than suits our sensibilities. It doesn’t exactly sound like a fine dining experience to hear Jesus say we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood, but Jesus wasn’t appealing to people’s standard appetites when he spoke these words. Jesus was dealing with people who were needing to see things differently. Jesus was being intentionally shocking when he spoke these words. The leaders of Israel were feeding people the wrong ideas, and many of the people had an appetite for the wrong things. Jesus had come to offer the true bread of heaven, and it was not what they were used to consuming.

It’s sort of amazing what people can eat and think is good. I remember one evening at the Hong Kong Café one member of the kitchen crew had a friend come to dinner, and he decided to send out some complimentary egg rolls. But these were going to be special egg rolls. Instead of the usual filling my friend shredded a paper napkin, mixed it with some cabbage, rolled it up, fried it and sent it out. He was expecting his friend to send them back with an appropriate message, but instead they ate them and thanked him for the nice egg rolls.

This was the day I realized that when you deep fry something and provide some good sauce with it – it will pretty much taste ok. It’s sort of remarkable what we are capable of consuming, and what we think is good to eat.

You might say the people of Israel had become spiritually malnourished. What they were feeding upon was not what they needed. The people were being fed the idea that in order to be reconciled with God you had to attend a certain number of religious feasts where you brought religiously certified animals to the religiously certified priests that you purchased at the religiously certified market with religiously certified coins. The religion of Israel was very intertwined with what you ate, and Jesus considered that to be a terrible distortion of the truth. He came to reveal the truth, and he told the people that if they wanted to know the truth they didn’t need to do what the religiously certified people were telling them to do. He said they should eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Jesus was shocking to the people of his day, but he wasn’t just trying to shock them. Jesus wanted people to experience a new dimension of life, and in order to do that they needed to let go of life as they knew it. Jesus wanted people to let go of their false understanding of God and to experience the true nature of God – to stop feeding on the wrong thing and to consume the truth. What Jesus was saying when he told the people they should eat his flesh and drink his blood was not the physical truth, but it was the spiritual truth. Jesus was telling them that they needed to internalize him if they wanted to experience true life.

And he is telling us the same thing that he told them – that we are to step out of life as usual and in to a new dimension of living. We are not to consume the standard fare of our day – we are to be people who feed on the truth.

We don’t live in a world that’s so guided by religiously based dietary rules and rituals and requirements. There are people within our country who have very strong religious convictions about what they do and don’t eat, but most people who embrace dietary restrictions and protocols do so out of health or ethical concerns. What we eat is often connected to what we believe, but Jesus challenges us to consider the way in which what we believe feeds the way we live.

As Christians, you might say we are people who profess Jesus Christ to be the one who guides our lives, but Jesus was very challenging to the people of his day who claimed the faith of Abraham and Moses without really feeding upon the truth of the tradition. I don’t believe that any particular denomination contains the whole truth about Jesus, nor do I think any of us ever have a perfect and complete understanding of who Jesus was and what he taught, but I do believe we can continue to get closer to the truth if we will continue to strive for a more complete understanding.

We aren’t able to consume the whole truth at any one setting, and it’s important for us to remember that. Feeding on the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ is a lifetime quest, and it’s important for us not to reduce him to the kind of food we like to eat. Our challenge is not to do the same thing to Jesus that the officially religious people of his day had done to the faith of Israel.

Jesus is the freshest and the richest food available, and if we will let his truth nourish us we will experience the freshest and richest life that we can possibly have. What Jesus offers to us is the opportunity to rise above the surface of life and to live a life that isn’t defined by the standard fears, expectations, and rewards of this world.

But don’t expect it to be easy to allow Jesus to be your primary source of nourishment. Our world isn’t exactly like it was when John wrote his account of Jesus, but in some ways it’s not that different. As it was in the days when John wrote these words, our world expects us to live with fear of not doing what’s expected of us and it doesn’t reward challenging behavior. People continue to have an appetite for the wrong things, and it’s not easy to find the fresh food that Jesus Christ offers.

I know I’m not being particularly clear about what it means to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, but I don’t guess anyone ever knew exactly what Jesus was saying when he spoke these unusual words. These aren’t easy words to hear, but they are important words, and they are challenging words. Jesus isn’t easy to follow, but he is the source of the best food and drink that our souls can ever experience.

Let’s not be content with the standard fare of life. Let’s have an appetite for a more abundant way of living. I think it’s the only way to truly satisfy the hunger of our hearts.

Thanks be to God for coming in to the world in the life of Jesus Christ – who invites us all to feast at the table of truth and of life. May we have the wisdom and the desire to show up at his table.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Miraculous Extraction
Psalm 130

1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD.
2 Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
3 If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?
4 But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.
5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; 6 my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem.
8 It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

I consider the appearance of the recommended Psalm for this week, Psalm 130, to fall in to the category of a serendipitous harmonic convergence. It might not meet the criteria for an act of divine providence, but there’s a nice coincidence going on here. This may have escaped your attention, but CNN made a pretty big deal of the fact that August 5 was the fifth anniversary of the entrapment of 33 miners inside the San Jose Gold and Copper Mine near Copiapo, Chile – which sparked an international rescue operation that resulted in their rescue 69 days later. Even if you didn’t hear anything about this anniversary, I’m guessing that you remember the event. They say that about a billion people were tuned in to this story when the men started to emerge from the mountain.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!

I think I read this Psalm shortly after hearing that this week marked the fifth anniversary of that remarkable event, and I couldn’t shake the sense of appropriateness that this Psalm provides in light of that story. I knew their rescue was an incredible event, but I didn’t really know how miraculous it was until I did a little mining for more information about what happened.

In case you aren’t as much of a news nerd as I am let me share some of the details of what happened. The trapped miners were assembled in a small room that was about a half a mile below the surface of the earth. This little refuge had tunnels connected to it, but they were encapsulated in a pretty small space, and they realized early on that there wasn’t a way out. Nobody knew if the trapped miners were alive, and the miners didn’t know if there was any chance that they could be rescued.

The President of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, saw to it that huge rescue operation got underway quickly, but there had never been such a rescue, and this mine was cut in to some of the hardest rock that you will find on earth. Early on they established a two phase plan for the rescue. The first phase was to try to drill a small hole as quickly as possible in to the refuge area that would be large enough to provide fresh air and to transport food and supplies to the miners, and the second phase would be to drill a wider hole that a NASA designed rescue capsule could be send down to retrieve the miners one at a time. This mine was about 100 years old, and not well mapped, but even if they knew exactly where that underground refuge was located it was a long shot for a drill to hit it.

This quickly became an international story and an international effort, and three different drill technologies were used to try to get to the spot where the men had presumably gathered. The room that these men assembled in had a footprint of about 530 square feet. They calculated that there was about a1.25% chance of making contact with that space, but after 17 days of drilling the 12th bore hole entered the space where the men were located. The trapped miners were able to attach a note to the end of the drill bit, and when it was extracted the world realized that they were alive.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!

One of the side stories of this event was the way in which faith was manifested – both from the trapped miners and from the people who were seeking to rescue them. There are a lot of horrible situations that you can find yourself in on this earth, but being trapped in a small space about a half a mile inside a giant rock with limited food and water ranks right up there with the worst of them. I’m guessing this situation surpassed the depth criteria from which this Psalmist was considering when he or she first expressed this prayer.

Of course when you are in such a desperate situation how can you express anything other than a plea to God for salvation? I think that’s the kind of situation that would bring a lot of focus in to most people’s prayer life. I’m sure I would have been in prayer whenever I wasn’t uncontrollably blubbering.

Fortunately there were some spiritually mature men within the group who came to think of themselves as The 33, and they did a good job of organizing themselves for survival as well as preparing themselves for their potential death.

They created a plan for distributing their limited food and water sparingly and fairly. They assigned tasks for keeping the space clean and they provided opportunities for physical fitness. They also had regular gatherings for prayer and worship, and the message they embraced was two-fold. They maintained their hope for rescue, but they also sought the courage to die with dignity if that was to be their fate.

It’s interesting that this Psalm begins with this powerful plea for deliverance – for God to hear the voice of their supplications, but then it immediately acknowledges the undeserving nature of the petitioner. I don’t think any of us can make a strong case to God for how much we deserve to be preserved. And this is probably one of the gifts that comes to us when we find ourselves in difficult circumstances. Life threatening situations strip away our most protected illusions of our selves. The loss of all control can help us see ourselves more clearly, and such clarity can enable us to develop more trust in the grace of God, and to become less impressed with our own capabilities.

Fortunately we don’t have to become encapsulated within the earth in order to develop such trust and dependence on God. Unfortunately we can find ourselves crying out from the depths without having to leave the house. Desperate-life-threatening situations can reach up and grab us at any time. And I’m not just talking about criminal trespassing. Life-stealing circumstances come to us in many different forms.

Disease, depression, addiction, estrangement, unemployment, and accidents can turn our lives upside down as quickly as a mine can collapse, and we can find ourselves as far from the goodness of life as those miners were suddenly thrust.

Few people have found themselves as cut off from the world in the way those miners were, but life becomes precarious for all of us at times, and this Psalm provides us with a good reminder of how to best respond to those situations – cry out to God!

Cry out to God and trust that the light of life will return. Trust in God and know that with God there is steadfast love. God doesn’t love us because we deserve it but because that’s what God does.

Cry out to God and trust that life will return even if life doesn’t turn out the way you want it to be. The good news that Jesus both trusted in and proclaimed doesn’t always play out nicely on the surface. The Lord of Life wasn’t well regarded here on earth, but he didn’t fail to change the world. I don’t think Jesus would have us believe that if we pray hard enough we will be delivered from all of our afflictions, but I do believe that our fervent prayers to God can put us in touch with life regardless of what kind of death-dealing circumstances come our way.

Trust in God helped those miners maintain hope that they would be rescued, and they gave credit to God for their miraculous extraction from that hole in the earth, but it was their trust in God that would have enabled them to die with dignity if it had come to that.

It always helps to cry out to God when we find ourselves in difficult territory. I believe God speaks to our souls in mysterious ways, but I also believe it helps us to see ourselves more clearly and our neighbors and loved ones more graciously. None of us are without fault, but none of us are beyond the love of the One who can provide us with the opportunity for redemption.

Thanks be to this One who hears the voice of our supplications, and who provides us with miraculous extractions from the deepest of depths.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Do What?
John 6:24-35

6:24 So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. 25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” 26 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 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. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” 28 Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 30 So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'” 32 Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

One day a Jewish rabbi was walking down the street and as he passed a barber shop he decided to go in and get a haircut. The barber gave him a nice haircut and when the rabbi went to pay the barber said, No, you are a man of God and this is my gift to your good work. The next morning when the barber arrived at his shop he found a nice loaf of bread from a local bakery, and a note from the rabbi saying how grateful he was for the nice haircut.

Later that day an Episcopal priest happened by and decided he needed a haircut, and he went in and got one. When started to pay the barber told him the same thing – that there would be no charge for the haircut because he wanted to contribute to his ministry. The next morning when the barber arrived at his shop there was a bottle of wine with a nice note on it thanking the barber for his generosity.

Later that day a United Methodist minister came by and went in for a haircut, and once again the barber didn’t charge him for the haircut. He said, No, you are a man of God and this is my contribution to your ministry. The next morning, when the barber arrived at his shop there were three other United Methodist ministers waiting for him to arrive.

I wouldn’t single out United Methodist ministers for this kind of abuse if I wasn’t one, but I happen to know that there is a good amount of truth to the story. Of course there would probably some truth to this story if you inserted any denomination or profession in to the punch line. The fact is that human beings in general are inclined to show up for a good deal. Good free stuff always gets out attention.

We like to get what we think we need, and we will go to great lengths to have our perceived needs met. I think it’s important to differentiate between our actual needs and our perceived needs because we can get those things confused. Of course food is more than a perceived need – we actually do need food to survive, but sometimes we are inclined to think that’s all we need. In some ways our lives revolve around getting food, and that’s understandable – we are biological creatures in need of fuel, but we aren’t just biological creatures, and I think this is what Jesus was getting at when he said: Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.

This is a large challenge for us. We do have to work for some of that perishable food if we don’t want to perish, but we can get overly focused on our material needs at the expense of our spiritual lives. Of course getting an adequate amount of that perishable food is a large challenge for a lot of people. I don’t have the statistics in front of me right now, but there is a lot of food insecurity in our state and in our nation these days. There are a lot of hungry people all across this country and this is a terrible thing. It’s awful that that there are so many people who have trouble getting enough food for themselves and for their children. I don’t know how to fix this, but I know it’s important to be sensitive to this, and to do what we can to help people get what they need.

I know that food isn’t all that we need, but I assure you if I was a person who came from a place or from a family where food was scarce, and I heard Jesus was feeding people in a miraculous manner I would have been one of the first people to go looking for him. And he probably would have been talking to me when he differentiated between the people who were following him because they saw God in him and those who followed him because of the good bread he was handing out.

Jesus comes across as being somewhat confrontational in this passage, and I get that also. I know that its possible for us to become overly focused on the wrong things. We can become very twisted in our pursuits, and it’s often hard for us to see how off balance we are. We need to have our ways of thinking and our patterns of behavior challenged every now and then – otherwise we remain focused on feeding our least essential needs and desires.

In my work as a pastor I am often approached by people who have tremendous needs. This is not something I regret. It’s honestly something I try to address in a sensitive manner. I know that this world can be a very hard place for a lot of people. It’s easy to get behind, and it can be hard to catch up, but I also know there are people who get in bad patterns of behavior and they won’t do what they need to do to break the patterns.

There was a man I knew in Little Rock that drove me crazy in that way. I hardly ever saw this man when he wasn’t asking me for something. I don’t know how many times I would be heading to or from my car at the church and I would hear this person yell out at me: Hey Rev.!! And he would not be calling out to say hello. When he said Hey Rev, what I heard was, Hey Rev, I’m going to come tell you some story of why it’s critical that you buy me some phone time or a bus pass or give me a new backpack and something to eat. On more than one occasion I told him how much I dreaded seeing him because I knew it was going to cost me something. He rarely got all that he wanted from me, but I rarely got away from him without having to give him something. I did some fine preaching to him about his unfortunate pattern of behavior, but I think those sermons did more to make me feel better than they did to create any adjustment in his way of living.

Bad patterns of behavior are hard to break – for all of us. I never sensed that this needy man in Little Rock was ever able to find the kind of food that endures, but it could be that his perpetual quest for what struck me as perishable food was just more obvious with him than it is for most of us. In all honesty, it’s not easy for any of us to remain focused on pursuit of the food that doesn’t perish. And this is what Jesus revealed to the people who were chasing after at him in hope of getting something to eat. He told them they were looking for the wrong thing. They responded by asking him what they should do, and I think they were a little baffled by what he told them they needed to do.

He told them that they needed to believe in him. And they responded to that by asking him to do something that would enable them to know he had come from God.

It’s easy for us to think those people were being pretty dense when they asked this man who had recently fed 5000 people with a handful of fish, walked across the sea, and calmed a storm to show them a sign of his connection to God. But what I know is that when we aren’t looking for the right thing there is nothing that will ever satisfy our need for more.

I think this story is designed to remind us of how wrong-headed we can be about what we think we need and what we expect from God. It’s easy for us to have the wrong expectations of God and those wrong expectations can prevent us from seeing who Jesus was and from doing what he said to do. We can be as dense as those first followers when it comes to seeing Jesus for who he was, and if we aren’t careful we can remain devoid of the food that endures even while we claim belief in Jesus.

If you are expecting me to explain how to adjust your way of thinking you have the wrong expectations of me as well because I don’t really know what you need to do to become more focused on the food that endures. All I know is that it’s possible to want the wrong things – even when you say the right words. What I know is that it’s possible to have treasures in heaven when you have nothing on earth or to have a malnourished soul when you are surrounded by wealth. I wish I could give you some fine instructions on how to do what Jesus said to do, but all I feel capable of saying is to watch out for yourselves.

Watch out for your self because it’s not easy to stay on the path to true life. It’s easy to want the wrong things and to work for the wrong kind of food. It’s hard to follow Jesus, but the good news is that God knows this and God provides us with some of that miraculous bread from heaven regardless of what we think we need and work to obtain. God reaches out to us in surprising ways, and the best thing we can do is to try to pay attention to those gracious moments. It’s not easy to see the truth about ourselves or God, but that is what Jesus came to reveal, and by the grace of God this can happen.

We do have access to the kind of food that endures. Do all that you can to find it, and know that God wills for us all to feast upon it. Thanks be to God.
Amen.

The Feeding of the One
John 6:1-21
6:1 After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. 2 A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. 3 Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. 5 When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. 7 Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” 10 Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. 11 Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. 14 When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” 15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. 16 When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, 17 got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. 18 The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. 19 When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. 20 But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” 21 Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.
It’s not often that I find myself in actual need of food. I frequently get hungry, but when I get hungry I start thinking about what kind of food I want and where I’m going to go to get it. Getting hungry is actually sort of recreational for me. I like to get a little hungry so I can fully enjoy the dining experience. Getting hungry isn’t normally a crisis for me – it’s an opportunity for a sensational experience.

But I actually found myself in need of food last Monday night, and that’s a different experience from feeling a little hungry before I grab a handful of potato chips. It was my own fault, but I got stranded last Monday evening without any food at our family lake-house on Greers Ferry Lake. This is a lake-house that my grandparents built when I was about 7 years old and it’s a place my immediate family shares with my sister and a handful of cousins. We divide the summer weeks among us sort of like a time-share thing, but we all know each other so if you leave it in a mess people will talk about you, so we all try to leave it clean for the next family.

Part of leaving it clean is not leaving a bunch of old food in the refrigerator. That had sort of become a problem, so we started cleaning out the refrigerator at the end of each week, and the refrigerator looks a lot better than it used to. There are a few condiments in there, and an occasional bottle of olives, but there’s really nothing to eat in there. And it’s the same way with the cabinets. You can find a variety of seasonings in there, but we just make it a practice not to leave any food up there.
Sharla and I had entertained a good chunk of our extended family last weekend, but everyone left pretty quickly on Sunday, and I was to go up on Monday to do some final cleaning, to put gas in the boat, and to haul the trash away. I drove my 1979 Chevy pickup up there, because I needed to get a few boards for a future dock project and for trash hauling, but on the way up there it engaged in some unsettling engine sputtering a couple of times.

I didn’t want it to die on me in the middle of nowhere as I returned to Newport after dark, so after I took care of some boat issues that needed to be addressed, I engaged in what I thought would be a simple replacement of a fuel filter on my truck. And this is one of those cases where a little knowledge can get you in a lot of trouble.

I’ll spare you the details of my mechanical blundering, but about the time it got perfectly dark I had managed to render my truck immobilized. There wasn’t anything I could do until the auto-parts store opened the next morning at 7:30, and even then it was going to take some luck to get it going.

I felt fortunate to have comfortable accommodations, but I was not where I intended to be, and I was hungry. I had eaten all of the olives I thought I could eat without getting sick, but I wanted something else, and I couldn’t find anything. It was 10pm and the nearest convenience store was 1.3 miles away (I had googled it), and I didn’t want to walk that far, so I decided I would just make some really sweet tea for supper. And it was when I opened the cabinet for about the fourth time to get a tea bag and some sugar that I discovered that there actually was a can of Hormel’s chili without beans hidden amongst the spices.
I don’t know how old that can was. I didn’t check it. And I can tell you that under normal circumstances I would never eat a bowl of canned Hormel’s chili without beans, but I was so happy to find that can of chili, and I wasn’t hungry when I went to bed.

It was a terrible feeling to be hungry and to not have access to food. That just doesn’t happen to me very often. I wasn’t in a real crisis. I know people I could have called if I was in a terrible bind. Sharla offered to drive up from Little Rock and bring me some food, but I didn’t want her to do that. Our elderly neighbor up there would have fed me, but she goes to bed at dark. I could have called Rev. Tommy Toombs, the United Methodist minister in Heber, and asked him to bring me some food, but I never would have heard the end of that. I just didn’t have any good options.

That experience sensitized me to this issue of being in a place without food, and the joy of being surprised by the appearance of sustenance. Whenever I’ve thought about this story of Jesus feeding five thousand people in that miraculous manner, I’m always inclined to think of the largeness of the event. It strikes me as being sort of like a music festival atmosphere – where you have a bunch of people showing up in one spot without adequate provisions. I think the story is designed to impress us hearers with the amazing capacity of Jesus to provide for so many people, but today I’m conscious of what it would have felt like to have been an individual in the midst of that crowd.

I’m not thinking about what it would have felt like to have been on hand for such an amazing spectacle – today I’m thinking about what it feels like to be hungry, and to receive food.

The story is impressive, and it’s intended to be impressive, but I’m not as impressed by the number of people who were fed in a miraculous fashion as I am mindful of how powerful it is for us as individuals to experience saving grace. And when I say saving grace I mean everything from the grand experience of feeling miraculously reconciled with God in an ultimate way – to receiving something to eat when we are hungry. Saving grace takes form in many different ways. But it’s always a powerful thing to go from feeling remarkably vulnerable and in need – to having our needs met in a remarkable way.

And this is what Jesus was able to do. As the story goes, Jesus was able to do this on a grand scale, but the number of people Jesus was able to feed is pretty meaningless if you haven’t somehow found yourself nourished by Jesus in an opportune moment. It doesn’t matter how many thousands or even millions of people Jesus was reportedly able to feed with a few loaves and fish if you haven’t felt touched by him on a personal level.

But please don’t hear me saying that in a manipulative way. I’m really not trying to draw a dividing line between those who have had powerful personal experiences with Jesus and those of us who haven’t. I’m not saying it’s your own fault if you’ve never felt like you’ve sat down on a grassy hill and been fed by the hand of Jesus. Honestly, this day in the life of Jesus and his followers that John describes is pretty far beyond a day in the life of your average United Methodist, but I think this story is designed to whet our appetite for an encounter with Christ. John is telling us more about what we can expect from Jesus than what we may have experienced.

Early on in this passage we are told that the Jews were nearing the time of the Passover festival. The significant thing about that detail is that many of the people who were following Jesus weren’t welcome at the Passover festival. The people who were following Jesus out into the wilderness didn’t meet the qualifications that were required in order to celebrate this highest of Jewish festivals. Most of these people weren’t welcome in the Temple or even in the synagogues.

They weren’t able to meet God in the official place of worship, but by following Jesus out in to the mountainous wilderness they were in fact encountering the living God. I think John wanted us to understand that Jesus had replaced the Temple as the place to go to find God. You don’t have to follow strict religious codes to encounter God – you only have to follow Jesus.
So where do we go to find Jesus? This is a question I often find myself asking, and it’s a question that’s a lot easier to ask than to answer. Jesus was never easy to find. As the story goes, the people who found him had followed him out to a desolate location, but Jesus didn’t try to be elusive – not until they tried to turn him in to a king. But Jesus has never been easy to find and to follow because what he did was challenging to everyone. Jesus defied many of the deeply held convictions of some of the most righteous people of his day, and that undoubtedly remains true for us. Jesus didn’t do what anyone expected the son of God to do.

But one of the things he did do was to show up for people who were facing the most desperate circumstances. He fed the people who were hungry and then he appeared to the disciples as they were battling the storm on the sea. Jesus isn’t easy to follow, but he can show up for us regardless of where we are when we really need him, and it changes everything for us when he does.

There isn’t an easy answer to the question of where we should go to find Jesus, but I think Jesus was giving us a pretty good hint when he fed hungry people. Jesus was sensitive to the needs of the individuals who were near to him, and I think he expects the same from us. Sometimes I forget how devastating it is to be without the essential elements of life, but I had a quick tutorial the other night on the value of food, and it reminded me how powerful it can be to get food when you are hungry and helpless.

Jesus doesn’t necessarily show up when we want him to and feed us upon demand, but I believe he comes to us in ways that we could never foresee or imagine. John didn’t tell these stories so we would be impressed with his supernatural abilities – John told these stories to remind us what we should be doing for one another and to provide us with reassurance during the trials of our lives. And if you’ve ever received a morsel of his grace – you know how powerful his presence can be.

Thanks be to God. Amen