Year B, Proper 15: Ask What I Should Give You

I feel like I shouldn’t share this sermon out of its congregational context without prefacing it with a few caveats. This was a difficult sermon for me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but it was one that I felt safe enough to preach with St. Mary’s House. There is always a lot beneath the surface of any piece of writing, but this time I don’t think everything made it to the top that needed to.

One thing that I don’t think came across as clearly as I meant it was my critique of the antisemetic influences of the Gospel reading. In my mind, the dramatic thrust of the argument was to take its cues from the five-part bread-of-life/diminishing crowd discourse/motif we’ve been following in the RCL. I tried to communicate this in a plain way, but I think my effort towards simple language here allowed for too much ambiguity in my perspective. This Gospel movement here was supposed to be the second of four cautionary sketches of evangelism gone awry.

I am also reflecting on the ambiguity of my use of the verb “imagine” on the part of the corporate beliver in the final movement. I wanted to tie the end of the sermon in with language that linked to the story about imaginary things in the beginning. Perhaps what is not clear in my effort is my argument that our imaginations are one of the gifts with which we approach the God whom we can never fully understand. By saying that we “imagine our world fully inhabited by Christ” I do not mean to diminish what we imagine as being somehow less real because it comes from our imagination- I mean that we use our imaginations to perceive and discuss that which is essentially beyond many other facilities of understanding. This, in itself, could use some development on my part.

My hope was to preach a sermon that touched on the very real dangers present in Christian evangelism by exposing a particular image of our Eucharist for its potential for harm- and then at the last moment showing that the Church is utterly dependent on this very real, essential image to be healed of all the sin we are responsible for and ultimately grow into the body we are meant to be. Whether I accomplished this is still up for debate.

Preaching with St. Mary's House
Year B, Proper 15
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

"The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the principal high place; Solomon used to offer a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, 'Ask what I should give you.' "

In the name of God, who made us, saves us, and will not leave us alone. AMEN..



Here the bulls, here the rams,
Here the calves, here the sheep
Each halved and set next to a thousand variations of itself
A love gift of carnage made in columns and rows
And then suddenly, the voice of devotion’s aim itself:
“This is all fine and well, my new love,
But ask me what I should give you.”
Solomon sits upright, eyes wide,
Waking in the cold sweat of a dream.

“This girl is telling me that there’s a man
Bigger than the whole world
And more powerful than the whole world
And its just not true
And she won’t leave me alone.”
I look up from the pair of cardstock fairy wings I’m cutting out
To see Hannah, one of my seven-year-old art camp students
Visibly flustered.
“Of course its not true,”
I tell her automatically
“It sounds imaginary to me.”
We have this week, been talking about imaginary things
As seven year olds are wont to do.
Fairies, such as the kind I am making wings for, are imaginary.
Elves are imaginary.
Giants are imaginary past a certain height
But there are also very tall people.
Dinosaurs, while they do not exist any longer
Were in fact at one point real.
Monsters, while not real
Are often imaginary expressions of very real fears and dangers.
My student is still upset
Obviously beyond the tipping point of having her world-view
Screwed with by one of her peers.
“She said that he has hands bigger than the whole world
And that he made us with them.
And its just not true,
Its made up!”
It is then that I look up to see the girl in question, Josie,
Waiting, smiling, hands folded in the wings.
Taking my moment of clarity as an invitation to join
The conversation
Josie swoops in.
“Its just that if you don’t believe in God”
And -at this- she furrows her brow
“You won’t get into Heaven.”
The dissenting seven year old confronts her aggressor:
“Heaven isn’t real.”
And here finally,
Josie looks at her friend as if she’s just realized
That there’s a giant hole in her head
With all the pieces spilling out
And- more alarmingly- that no one else seems to see it
That its up to her to frantically gather them all up
And shove them back inside
Before the very life itself drains from the girl.
“Josie,” I intervene, “Hannah does not like the way you’re
Talking to her, and she’s asked you to stop.
This is something we need to talk about at home.”
And I send them back to their tables.
It is not enough, however, to deter the Evangelist from
Rallying forces.
“Maryanne,” she whispers to another friend,
“Hannah doesn’t believe in God
And I’m worried she’s not getting into Heaven.”
Understanding the cause for alarm
Maryanne quietly sets her work aside
And in a minute I see the two of them
Staring into Hannah’s face-
A second doctor for a second opinion:
She can see the hole too.
“Its just that if you don’t believe in God,
You’re going down there,”
And she points at the tiled floor of the classroom
Which is unobjectingly gathering more paint and chewing gum.
“Josie!” I bark from across the room.
“I asked you to stop!”
For a moment they scatter again
But only a moment and then they start creeping back
Covert- facing away from me.
Hannah’s head is on the table at this point
Arms crossed, ears blocked
So I move in to separate them personally.
As I approach I see that Josie has a small
Rainbow colored triket in her hand,
“Hannah,” she’s saying
Just as I am about to move her away
“If you’ll just say that you believe in God
I’ll give you this eraser.”

Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
You have no life in you.

“Its like you have a kind of cancer,”
the conservative Anglican blogger
Is telling my friend Pamela,
“And we have the cure for it.
Wouldn’t you want us to share the cure with you
If we knew that you were ill?”
The two are having a conversation
In the press box at General Convention
Finally, after the Anglican has spent the better part of the week
Avoiding Pamela
With her Integrity, rainbow-colored press credentials.
Pamela, determined to be friendly,
Determined to enter into dialogue
Had made the first moves,
Only to find her counterpart deeply emotional and afraid.
It was kind of sweet, she would later tell me, over drinks
She really seemed to be concerned for me.

And perhaps she was concerned.
Perhaps she was concerned the way
The first Christians were concerned that some Jews got it
And some Jews didn’t.
Concerned about the way some Jews called them out
Of their private practices for exactly what they looked like:
A cannibal harvest of their own history of leadership
Flesh and blood intermingled and unclean
Talking to a dead man buried in the past
While the present was dangerously neglected.
Concerned that some Jews were walking around
Business as usual
When the world had so clearly changed.
Walking around with holes in their heads.
Perhaps, in some communities
That were a little more removed from the origins of this drama
Communities like the one that first read this Gospel,
There was even a bit of disgust at the thought of sharing
Some common heritage with these people.
A fermented kind of insecurity at not being chosen
And not having the chosen choose to worship
The same vestiges of their own profound
Newly discovered understandings.
Just like in the story:
A miracle happens
Or a little piece of insight makes sense
And here come the Jews again
Crowding in, wanting to be fed.
Always putting up a fight about their own past
And then dropping out one by one
Shouting insults on the way,
“God gave our ancestors bread from heaven already”
or
“Your messiah had a mother and a father just like the rest of us”
And there the true disciples were again
The few, the chosen, the ones who understood,
Just like in the story.
The crowds: dispersed,
Disgusted at a Jesus who would give his own skin and fluids
To the tongues and teeth of his most Beloved
And the Beloved themselves:
not knowing any other way to be fed, remaining.
What better words to hear then
Than ones reminding them that they were on the inside
Of the right circle.
They were the ones who belonged.
What better words to hear a Savior say:
Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood
You have no life in you.

I could not look away this week
As the cable news networks
Honed in on footage from town halls across the country.
I watched as the same clips replayed over and over again
Untill the most radical, outspoken, and strangely informed
Citizens imprinted themselves on the back of my sight
Out-of-chair lunges repeating and multiplying themselves:
Phantom media images
Frozen in moments of extreme emotion.
They looked like zombies there,
Each with their own one line of dissent
Repeating like a mantra
They looked, in the television, possessed.
They can not have life in them, I thought.
And my words as I spoke them in my stupor
Were like a calming kind of poetry
Such a clean and simple way to instantly dehumanize someone.
Because if they did not have life in them
If the unfettered passion on display
Was somehow less than human
Somehow different from the passion in me
That makes coffee in the morning
and faces inquiring seven year olds with fairy wings
If the life I know to be life is not in them
Then I do not have to contend with them.
Then I do not have to contend with the fact that my neighbors
Are being strung up like puppets by the television I watch
And the monied interests I invest in for my own health
As I am strung up there beside them-
Then I do not have to contend with how ridiculous I must look
Holding up a Prop 8 sign
Speaking out of a megaphone
On a street corner downtown.
Do not have to contend with the fact that
My neighbors are afraid of things which I think best for them
Would likely slap my hand away the instant I tried to lift up
Some of the life spilling down from the holes
Which I so clearly believe to be in their heads.

And from here
From such clean, efficient dehumanization
As I am more than willing to participate in
As such perversions of public discourse so readily lend themselves to
From such inclinations of evangelism
That necessarily presume an antidote
To the misfits who so clearly need the life that we have found
From the heart of what most our church takes to be
Our principle, most impassioned Eucharistic image
Countless ways to die are born.
More and more details emerge this week
Of the murderous rampage we unleashed in Iraq
By contracting the Blackwater corporation for private defense.
A corporation which the public learns more and more
To be run by religious zealots
With the clear motive in mind of
Seeking out Iraqi Muslims and killing them.
With the clear motive in mind
Of establishing a Christian world
Made finally alive
By the eradication of all who had no life to begin with.

Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood
You have no life in you.
These are the words we choose again and again
To imagine our world
Fully inhabited by Christ,
God’s Body fully accessible in the very materials
Of our skin, bones and fluids made food
For a world in desperate need of saving touch and sustenance.
We know what it is to have no life
To be struck off balance by the uneasy transactions
of our daily give and take
To need, urgently, food that transcends
Our normal economy of equal exchange
For unimaginable abundance and gift.
And we can recognize that hunger in our neighbor.
And in words that place us in such a radical offering
In words that imagine such a critical traffic of need
In the urgency, in the severity
Of one of our most impassioned Eucharistic images
We are also yoked to consistently realized
Potential for death:
Strangers dying to one another’s humanity
The walls built up between them
By lines of scripture just like these.
Iraqi Muslims
Sought out and gunned down
By the religious zealots imagining a Christian world
without them.
Jews questioning
The Messianic implications
Of a startling new sect in their midst
Villified by the lack of life
We seek to give
No life in you-
No life in you-
No life in you.
In the urgency, in the severity
Of one of our most impassioned Eucharist images
We give ourselves easily
To the tribalism of the world
To another reason to peer up suspiciously
From the bloody feast of our belonging
At what might lie beyond our circle
In the darkness:

Death,
A billion separate sects and tribes
A billion reasons not to see our neighbors
Dying in this world,
And then, finally, beyond that:
God
Staring in alarm at the hole in our head
As all our life falls from us to the floor.
“Ask me what I should give you”
God cries in a thousand tongues
To the church that lies dying in its own murderous rage
Against itself and against a world
That it could never separate from.
“Ask me what I should give you”
God whispers in the ear of Solomon
Behind eyes that have seen enough carnage
On the altars of the Lord.
“Ask me
And I will fill you
With my very life
I will become the very flesh and food and drink you need
To comfort feed and heal you from this poison you have made-
Ask me what I should give you.”
And even as the invitation in our hearing fades
And the life of the church and world go limp for wont of feeding
One another
God holds us anyway:
A fevered body in the night
To be kept awake with stories
Of the time we were as young as Solomon
Eyes widening to imagine
All the asking we are called to do.

Year B, Proper 14: Caught Between Heaven and Earth

Guest Preaching with St. Mark's Raleigh


Year B, Proper 14
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51



The wine tool made it in.
As did the cheese grater,
the citrus juicer,
and
the pastry knife-
Each without a second thought.
But then I came to the spring-form cake pan, and paused.
Will I really need a spring-form cake pan
in seminary?
Will there be time for baking apricot-ricotta coffee cakes
In between Elementary Greek and CPE?
Such are the questions that have plagued me
Over the past several weeks
As I have systematically reduced
The contents of my already small studio apartment
In preparation for a 184 square foot dorm room
At the top of four flights of stairs
In a hopefully renovated 19th Century building
That may or may not have access
To a community kitchen.
Upon further deliberation
I removed the wine tool from the box after all-
But only so I could keep it somewhere
Much more easily accessible.

Many Americans who can afford it
And not infrequently, most who can't
Have a lot of stuff.
In an effort to make a home for ourselves
In this fleeting, frightening world
Most of us have gone about
Staving off our inevitable mortality
By acquiring things.
Stocking up sure and solid possessions meant to serve as
Proof against our much less permanent memories
That we were here.
That photograph of us against a painfully blue sky
Sitting on the mantle
Is proof that there was a time before "stay-cations"
When we actually let ourselves relax
On some stretch of shore
A hundred miles away.
Our grandmothers china
Silently acquiring its cubic foot of dust from the attic
Is proof that there was a time
When this august matriarch of our families heritage
Was as real as two hands setting a table for supper.
Receipts and tax documents shoved into a shoebox
Like some kind of bizarre financial wailing wall
In the nether most regions of our closets
Give us a tangible trail of evidence
Proof that we are who we say we are
And we have purchased what we've said we have.
We acquire a thousand little things such as these
And then set them down about us
In neat piles
as if they
In and of themselves were enough to keep us grounded here.
A thousand small extensions of ourselves
A thousand anchors cast
To keep us tied to this thing we call home
And, history.
And, security,
We build these homes for ourselves out of all we have acquired
We spend our days toiling to build up on this Earth
A little piece of the Heaven we've imagined for ourselves
And then, for the most part, we stay stuck there.
Stuck between these ideas of who we are
Who, I dare say, God wants us to be
And what those ideas look like
working on the ground.

I like to think of myself
As something of a chef
Baking and preparing a good meal
Are how I imagine myself extending hospitality
To those I love.
And to that end I have acquired a lot of things
To help me live that out.
And to that end I packed my kitchen box
Full of every variety of cooking accoutrement that would fit
In preparation for my big move.
But as I lugged this large, awkwardly weighted box
Down the fire escape in the back of my old apartment building
It wedged itself somehow in one of the weird angles
Of the metal stair frame
And I was stuck
Trying to balance the weight of this box
And dislodge it at the same time, mid-air
And before I knew it the cardboard snagged on the metal
And all the contents of my preciously packaged cooking life
Emptied themselves down several flights of the metal stairs
Into the street.

Absalom
Would have fared well
To only be so hung up
On cooking utensils.
But as we find him this morning
Absalom is stuck instead
At the mortal end of an epic struggle
For nothing less
Than possession of his father=s house.
Absalom, by this passage
Has sought to acquire
Nothing less
Than the kingship of Israel.
Absalom is portrayed in the Book of Samuel
As being something of a bit player
In a family cycle of divine retribution
Whose initial cause is utterly beyond him.
It began when King David
Raped Bathsheba and then murdered her husband Uriah
When he could not account for her resulting pregnancy.
This offense was so great against God
That David's prophet Nathan told him it would continue to
Come back to haunt his household.
When Absalom's sister, Tamar, is raped
By their half-brother
It is written as a consequence of
Their father, King David's own shameful behavior
And when Absalom avenges his sister's rape
By killing their half-brother
his resulting exile from Jerusalem
Is the price he pays
For involving himself in an ever widening circle
Of family violence and shame.
Eventually, Absalom and his family are allowed back in the city
But only if they keep their distance from the King-
Absalom is portrayed by scripture, at this point
As a beautiful, vain, narcissistic man,
And the reader cannot be surprised
As vanity is often a symptom of such deep, familial insecurity.
Absalom grows his hair out very long
So long that he cuts it and weighs it each year
His beauty, his hair, kept as a possession
Sure proof against his value in an otherwise
Devalued position in the family's shame.
And the reader cannot be surprised then
When Absalom takes this matter of his
Devalued family position
Into his own hands
When he tries to save himself
By acquiring the very household that holds its power over him.
Absalom waits on the side of the road to Jerusalem each day
He talks to Israelites who are taking their affairs to the King
for judgment
And one by one Absalom wins them over
By speaking in grand terms of the favor he would show them.
Years of this pass by,
and eventually Absalom acquires a massive army
in his favor against his father, the King.
The King learns of his sons new power
And has no choice but to abandon the royal house
With all his family in tow
And Absalom with his army enters it
And marks it finally
As his own.
This battle
We read of today
Is nothing less
Than an epic struggle
Between father and son
For possession of the household
That holds the fate of each
Inexorably tied to their mutual history.
But the battle, we read, doesn't take nearly as much life
As the land does that day.
As Absalom is riding through the forest on the way to battle
He gets caught in the tangled branches of a terebinth tree
And his mule rides on without him.
The Hebrew here literally says that he gets caught by his head
But many translations
Such as the one commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society
Write this to say that Absalom gets caught up by his hair
In the branches of the great tree,
Caught up, that is, by the very extensions of his own vanity
In the world.
And that is where Absalom dies.
Caught between Heaven and Earth.
Feet dangling, ungrounded
Unable to escape his enemies as they circle around him.

Can you see yourself in the picture our lesson paints for us?
Our lives may be fortunately removed from so much violence
Our family disputes may not involve any claims to kingship
Of a great nation
But can you see yourself there anyway
Caught by your big head in the branches of the terebinth tree
Fully responsible for the fight that has led you here
A fight for some claim
on the power that dictates your own life
Fighting the power that has made you, that is beyond you
And caught up in the details that would leave you hanging
Feet dangling, ungrounded
Caught between Heaven and Earth.
Have you been that hungry for the power to save yourself?


Jesus
knows something of our hunger for security
knows something of what we will do to acquire power
for ourselves.
You can see it in the way he always hides his own power.
He brings people back from the dead
Back from the brink of debilitating, isolating illness
And then tells them not to say a word of it
To anyone.
One minute he is dazzling in divine glory
Flanked by Moses and Elijah on a mountain top
And the next he is insisting that his disciples keep what is seen
To themselves
So they can get on with business as usual.
And what happens when the secret is out?
Jesus feeds five thousand on a hillside
Little more than a working lunch, really
To keep the conversation going
But the next thing you know the throngs are pressing in.
They can sense his power
And they want to acquire a piece of it for themselves.
Jesus calls them on it.
You're here because you've had your fill of bread, he tells them
But bread will only make you hungry again
And I am about more than that
I am about bread that will leave you satisfied forever
Bread of God.
They stare at him
There are tears, even, in a few
At the thought of finally finding the one thing
That might keep them full
After too many years spent at empty tables-
But then in the same breath he confounds the whole thing:
I am that bread from Heaven, he says.
It is my own flesh you are hungry for
Take me for your food.
Faces in the crowd that were, for a moment at least, hopeful
Turn sour at this
As the prospects of acquiring, and
Possessing for themselves
Some new secret to life
To security
To the power of abundance
Are suddenly made to sound like a cruel joke.
Some Heaven you come from, they say
Your mother and father live right down the street.
Some stay to argue
But most have lost the will
And simply turn away.


If Jesus has struck a cord here,
it is because he has called out our habits
For storing up a life of safety for ourselves
By linking it to one of our most visceral needs:
The need to be fed.
How else do we better acquire something
How else do we possess it
Than by raw, visceral consumption?
And what else is all that power and security good for
If not for first meeting our basic physical needs.
Jesus knows something
About how much we want to take charge for ourselves
Of the divine power that seems to hold us in its sway
How much we want to acquire for ourselves
that claim Jesus seems to have
On abundance.
"Give us this bread always" the people cry
Give us this power to feed ourselves
To take the matter into our own hands.
The connection of this desire for unending bread
To the manna their ancestors received in the wilderness
Runs deep.
For it was the same impulse in the wilderness
That led some in the camp of Israel
To take the manna that God provided each morning
And store it away.
To gather it up
And set it down about themselves
In neat piles
As if it
In and of itself were enough to keep them grounded and safe.
And those who tried to save that manna
Who just couldn't bare to rely on God to provide
Their daily ration each morning
Woke to find every bit of it they had squirreled away
Infested by worms.
The bread of Heaven will not be possessed.
You have to treat this differently, Jesus says
Because God will confound any effort to be acquired.
The God that can be possessed
The God that can be set up like a trophy on the shelf
Or stored away like a trail of proof
Against our own hard-earned salvation
The God who can be trotted out of our closets
Every time we want to lord our own rightness
Over someone else
Is not God.
And the bread that can be acquired of our own labors
Will only leave us hungry again.
It is the life we are given, rather
That sustains us.We do not approach God
Rather it is God who draws us in, Jesus says.
We in learning to live with God
Learn to take the bread of life as God would give it to us
To open our hands and receive
What is shockingly available in the very flesh before us
As we release any hope we might have had
That we can build up for ourselves
Some fortress of possessions
To keep us safe.

So lets come down
From whatever trees our big heads have been stuck in these days
God is calling us out of whatever towers of treasures we=ve stored up
To taste the living bread that is right before our very eyes
In the very flesh itself.
It is here, present in this room, in the body that we share
And it didn't even take a spring-form cake pan
To make.