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.