James! Finally!

Sermon at Transfiguration Church, Mesa

Year B, Proper 17

Have you ever spent time looking at pictures of yourself from 2 years ago?  5 years ago? 10 years ago? Longer?  What comes to mind for you as you look at those pictures?  Is there some surprise about yourself?  Perhaps you can remember the dreams you had for yourself or those close to you when the picture was taken.  Perhaps you remember the hopes that turned out to be dashed. The hopes that should never have been hopes in the first place. The forgotten dreams that brings regret once remembered. The fulfilled dreams that brought great joy. 

Perhaps you’ve even looked back at old journals?  Or old lists of goals stuffed in a book somewhere that you come across when it’s time to do a deep cleaning.  I wonder what folks think about when they read those lists.  I wonder if we remember something about a better part of ourselves that we may have forgotten.

Let’s come back to that later, but I’m curious,

What are your favorite books of the Bible?

Part of the genius in the use of the lectionary—the three-year cycle of readings that are appointed for use in worship—is that it gives us a systematic breadth of biblical material over those three years.  One advantage is that we are not simply subjected to the whims of preachers who may want to simply stay in their own comfort zone or only preach their favorite passages.  But sometimes, if the preacher is patient, their favorite passages come around.

So I am excited to be here with you this morning!  Not only because I have always felt so welcomed in this community, but because I get to talk about the letter of James— my favorite!—one of the most radical and one of the most slandered books in the Bible! 

Elsa Tamez, a Latin-American feminist theologian, once noted that:

If the letter of James were sent to Christian communities in certain countries that suffer from violence and exploitation, it would very possibly be intercepted by government security agencies.  The document would be branded a subversive because of the paragraphs that denounce the exploitation by landowners (5:1-6) and the carefree life of merchants (4:13-17).  The passage that affirms that “pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world” (1:27) would be criticized as a reduction of the gospel or as Marxist-Leninist infiltration in the churches.  The community that was to receive this letter would become very suspicious to the authorities.[1]

Tamez was speaking in the context of civil unrest and revolution, and oppression in many Latin American countries.  The disappearances. The torture chambers. The assassinations.  Her point remains. 

The letter of James has had to deal with similar interceptions over its history.  This letter has made church authorities suspicious since the beginning, and perhaps the only reason it made it into the canon of scripture was the hard-fought consensus that it may have been written by James, the brother of Jesus.  And at that point it’s included because, hey, its Jesus’s brother.  Even then, its position as scripture was not solidified until the 400s. 

Further, In the Reformation, the letter suffered more malignment.  Reformers like Luther downplayed James’s letter for two reasons.

1)      Western Christianity has in general been more interested in figuring out the philosophical underpinnings of the faith than the implications of that work.  The controversies in Western theology have been more invested in who Jesus is and the fully human and fully divine nature of Christ.  Important work, to be sure; but in the meantime, a letter about the implications of living a holy life loses its luster or importance in the mainstream theological debates of the day.

2)      The reformers were concerned with how salvation works.  Is it by faith or works?  James was seen as too focused on works as opposed to Luther’s faith by justification alone.  There is a definite preference for Paul among the reformers.

a.      And actually, Luther said “St. John’s Gospel and his first epistle, St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians and St. Peter’s first epistle are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salvatory for you to know, even if you were never to see any other book or doctrine.  Therefore St. James’s epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it.”[2] 

Harsh!

The malignment did not end at the Reformation.  With the ascendance of historical-critical biblical criticism in the 1800s-1940s, many commentators simply thought that the letter of James was “too Jewish.”  The anti-Semitism exhibited in the scholarship showed up as some argued that the letter is actually a Jewish letter with references to Jesus added in later.  So it seemed to many to be an un-Christian letter in the New Testament.  Remember this is the anti-Semitism that set the stage for the holocaust, so naming something as “Jewish” was a way to dismiss it.  Never mind that even though James does not talk about who Jesus is, it is chock full of what Jesus said.  

But it’s not just in theology that James is not talked about.  The letter is frequently and historically cherry-picked in worship. We only hear it once for a few weeks every three years. Rarely is it preached upon.  In fact, missing from our lectionary are the first six verses of the fifth chapter of James, which read:

Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.

Throughout history, in churches where royalty, feudal lords, landowners, slave owners, corporate executives, and the richest donors to the church may be sitting in the front pew, few pastors have wanted to spend long commenting on that passage.  But it is a prophetic piece. And by prophetic, we do not mean just telling the future, but naming what is wrong in the community and larger society.  In essence, prophets are those who bring social critique, and in the Biblical sense; always point out when the poor are not being taken care of, which signals to the prophet that justice is not being served.  Because of this, James’ letter is in line with the prophets of the Old Testament (and Jesus!).                                                                                               

There are three angles through which to view the letter, and I commend these angles to you as you hear the passages from James as they are read over the next few weeks.  These angles are helpful in that they help illuminate in our own context the ways this letter still has much to say.

The Angle of Oppression and Suffering: There is a community of believers that suffers.  There is a group of rich people who oppress them and drag them before tribunals.  There are peasants who are exploited, Christians and non-Christians, by rich farmers who accumulate wealth at the expense of the workers’ salaries.[3]  There is a class of merchants who lead a carefree life with no concern for the poor.[4]

The Angle of Hope: The community of believers needs a word of hope, of encouragement, of reassurance concerning the end of the injustice.  James gives it to them from the very beginning of his letter.  We see hope in James’s greeting, his insistence on exhorting the community to faithful expectation and happiness in the face of unrelenting BS, in his words about God’s preference for the poor, God’s judgment against the oppressors, the anticipated end of that oppression, and the coming of the Lord.

The Angle of Praxis (practice):  The content of the letter is concentrated in this angle.  For James the denunciation of the present situation and the announcement of hope are not in themselves sufficient. Something more is needed: praxis [action, a practice].  He asks of these Christians a praxis in which they show a resolute patience; a consistency between words, belief, and deeds; a power with prayer; an effective wisdom; and an unconditional, sincere love among the members of the community that does not make distinction between members based on wealth [—or rather, to elevate the poor since the status of the rich so often guarantees that they will get respect.[5]][6]

This emphasis on the practice of faith is where James will concentrate for the rest of Chapters 1 and 2 in his letter, beginning with his admonition to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” 

This brings me back to the questions I started with.  Time has a way of dissolving one’s attention, intention, and resolve.  As James says, “if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.”  There are times in our faith that are like us coming to our senses, like looking up and breathing deeply of fresher air than the drudgery of life might normally allow, gaining a perspective so much greater than our own, only to then find our lives return to  tunnel vision in the act of existing.  But it’s amazing how soon the memory of our intentions can come back to us when we are confronted with it face-to-face.  That project you always wanted to do.  The commitment to spend more time with your loved ones.  Exercising the gift you offer to the world’s great need. The persistent sin that remains unaddressed.  How many times have you committed to something only to later discover much later that it had become forgotten?  How often have those commitments represented the better of your intentions and an impulse given to you by God through the Spirit?

James’s letter will cover a lot of ground in the next few weeks.  They are words well worth marking.  And it’s worth seeing that it is a letter that speaks to hope, oppression and suffering, and the shape of the holy life in ways immediately relevant to our own lives. 

I suggest that questions that confront us today are these:  Is there a greater purpose of your life that has been forgotten that needs to be recovered?  What is the thing God wants you to hold onto as your own precious work for the Kingdom we proclaim in word and deed?  How will you own this truth, and hold it as the gift it is in the days, weeks, and years to come?

May God bless us in both our hearing and doing, as we proclaim and build for the Good of the Kingdom.

---

[1] Tamez, Elsa. The Scandalous Message of James: Faith without Works Is Dead. Rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2002) 1.

[2] Wittenburg, 1522.

[3] Jas. 5.

[4] Jas. 4.

[5] Jas 2:1-6.

[6] This list of interpretive angles is found in Elsa Tamez, The scandalous message of James: faith without works is dead, Rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 11.

Meeting the Principalities and Powers

Sermon; St. Matthew’s, Chandler

Ephesians 6:10-20

 “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.”

I have always been interested in why people do the things they do. I was blessed that I was able to focus on that passion in my academic work.  In my undergraduate program, I focused on history and sociology to prepare for teaching social studies. During that time, my studies took a dark turn.  I focused on 20^th century history with an emphasis in genocide and religious violence.  An intense class on holy war within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam set the trajectory that took me from teaching high school to further study of religion and conflict at ASU, where I studied violence, torture, religion, sexuality, and politics—all of which are topics one is supposed to avoid in polite conversation at dinner parties. 

As I was studying these grisly topics, and continuing today, I’m haunted by this question:  To what extent can we name the violence of the last century and this century as something beyond the depravity of humankind?  What do we make of the Holocaust? Rwanda? Armenia? This country’s genocide of (and later attempts to wipe out the cultures of) indigenous peoples? Is it enough to chalk up the body count of the last 120 years to mechanized warfare, arms races, totalitarian governments, and effective propaganda campaigns by regimes bent on eliminating others?  We can fairly accurately describe the mechanisms of war, of economic oppression, of the social systems that hold others as deserving of apathy or death, but is there something else?  Is there something beyond the materialistic phenomenon we can study that accounts for the depravity humankind visits upon others? 

Paul would say there is something else afoot, something more than the material world we see.  And he does so in language that sounds odd to modern ears.  Paul speaks in a number of his letters of the "principalities and powers."  By this Paul means the spiritual and worldly forces that exist in opposition to God.  We hear about these powers in Ephesians today.

Contrary to the modern division between the spiritual and political that holds that the political is no place for the spiritual, Paul is:[1]

concerned with spiritual realities precisely in their relationship to political realities. Ephesians 6:12 contrasts the “enemies of blood and flesh” with the true enemies, using a five-fold repetition of the word “against”:

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh

          but against the rulers
          against the authorities
          against the cosmic powers
          against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places

While the first use of “against” describes those whom the struggle is not against, the remaining four uses describe the actual enemies against whom Christians are called to struggle. These four references move from the earthly realm to the heavenly, connecting the political realm to the spiritual. The terms “rulers” (archas) and “authorities” (exousias) are common terms in the New Testament and usually refer to human rulers and the authority they wield.[2] The third term, “cosmic powers” (kosmokratoras), is understood by most scholars as referring to a supernatural power, moving us from the [material] political realm into the spiritual. Finally, “spiritual forces” (pneumatika) refer explicitly to nonhuman forces, which are said to be not on earth but “in the heavenly places” (en tois epouraviois).

Taken together, these four terms describe “enemies” that span both the earthly and heavenly realms—transcendent, spiritual realities with earthly, political manifestations. The verse recognizes that earthly power relations are animated by spiritual realities that transcend any specific “flesh and blood” person or ruler.

More can be said about the powers and principalities, which stand for a dominion opposed to God.  The powers and principalities traffic in practices and ideas that keep us from seeing each other as equally beloved and redeemable by God.  The powers would prefer to derail the ministry of reconciliation Christians are called to witness to.[3]  Remember that a few weeks ago we read in Ephesians that Christ created in himself one new humanity, reconciling all to God in one body.[4]  In contrast, the powers and principalities keep telling us our differences are final and irreconcilable; attempting to cut us off from God and others.  Further, for the principalities and powers, there is active hostility to the equal loving regard we are offered by God.[5]  Colonialism, sexism, racism, and other forms of social stigma all fall within the control of principalities and powers that devalue the beloved of God while simultaneously telling others that they have a divine right to maintain an oppressive social order "for the good of us all."  Control and power is sanctified in lieu of holiness, forbearance, love, justice, and grace.  The principalities and powers resort to threat, harm, shame, and death.   You can know who you are dealing with by the fruits they produce.  And it is important to call the demons by their names.

The powers and principalities are not as transcendent nor as powerful as God, and yet they are more powerful than we humans on our own.  The promise of order and control that the powers and principalities offer is seductive.  This seductive quality of the powers and principalities explains their continued presence in our world.  We find ourselves caught by the powers and principalities in fallen institutions greater than the sum of our personal failings.[6]  And these powers are strong enough to corrupt even the holy things of God to their own use.  For instance, the very passage we are talking about this morning has the blood-stained dishonor of being one of the passages used to justify the slaughter of millions over the centuries through holy war In which Christians traded the spiritual armor and sword of God for that of leather and steel.[7]

This is the reality that Paul is speaking to:  that behind the forces of evil and degradation we see on earth, there are active spiritual forces at work seeking to destroy and corrupt the creatures of God.  To make such a case for spiritual evil in our modern setting is difficult.  And yet, it is worth noting that regardless of the degree to which we claim human or demonic agency in the problems of the world, it is evident that there are forces and institutions and persons that profit from death, degradation, alienation, and division.  These are powers that Christians have a duty to unmask, name, and engage.[8]

And there is good news.  Earlier in Ephesians, Paul writes that the greatness and goodness of God is at work through and in Christ, who is placed above the principalities and powers.[9]  The Church's role is one of proclaiming God's power—testifying to God's coming reign to these spiritual forces.[10]  And the promise we inherit is the coming complete destruction of these forces at the consummation of history.[11] 

How do we live into this good news?  How do we face this in-between time?

One way in which we practically live out our commitment to unmasking and engaging the powers is by heeding the reminder that they exist and that we are called to resist them.  At our baptism, and at our reaffirmation of the baptismal covenant, we promise and pray that we will “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God" and ”renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God."[12]  These renunciations speak of throwing off the world's claims about the proper place of others and seeking instead to discern the wild and radical things God is choosing to do. It means de-centering the will to power we find within ourselves in favor of God's will and mission for humanity.  It may mean taking chances since resisting the powers and principalities is not a popular option; hence Paul’s warning to stand firm in truth and faith and righteousness. 

But there is also a promise we share; a conviction Paul held that we are also offered in sure and certain hope.  Paul was convinced “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[13]  This persistent love, stronger than the worst that the world and its powers can attack us with, is a love worth clinging to.  It is also the basis for a gospel worth proclaiming with boldness.

_________________

[1] The following block of text is taken verbatim from Robert Williamson’s “The Politics of White Supremacy—Ephesians 6:10-20.” http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/the-politics-of-white-supremacy/.

[2] See, for example, 1 Corinthians 15:24; Ephesians 1:21.

[3] 2 Cor 5:14-21

[4] See Eph 2:11-22.

[5] See Gal 3:28.

[6] This current course of the world is what is meant by the terms institutional sin, or structural sin. 

[7] As I was meditating on these verses from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, I couldn’t help but consider how these verses have been used in Christian moral reasoning in relation to violence.  In Christianity, there are three frameworks for understanding the use of violence:  pacifism, the just war tradition, and holy war (which is more of a notion than a clear framework). Both pacifism and the just war tradition name who is or is not a legitimate target of violence.  Pacifism holds that no one is a legitimate target of violence, and this was the prevailing opinion until the 300s AD.  Following Christianity’s conversion to the state religion of the Roman Empire, the just war tradition began its development.  A component of that moral reasoning was the attempt to delineate between combatants and non-combatants.  What makes holy war more of a notion than a framework is also what makes it instructive across religious lines—and holy war is different from pacifism or a concept of a just and limited war in that it divides the world into good and evil, eliminates neutrality, raises the stakes to a matter of ultimacy and immediacy, and prescribes no limits to the violence that can be visited upon the enemy. What makes holy war so dangerous and bloody is that the enemies made of flesh and blood are considered to be the earthly warriors in the ultimate cosmic battle of Good vs. Evil.  What happens on Earth is interpreted as a mirror or an outworking of the battle in the heavens, and so the targets of violence are to be given no quarter. In this thinking, there is no proper etiquette fit for those deemed to be direct agents of Satan. 

[8] These actions echo Walter Wink’s trilogy of books about Engaging, naming, and unmasking the powers and principalities.

[9] Eph 1:20-23

[10] Eph 3:7-12

[11] 1 Cor 15:24-28

[12] BCP, 302.

[13] Romans 8:38

Where did you find bread?

Proper 14 Year B RCL

John 6:35, 41-51

There are truths and experiences that could become less true when they are put into words, because words cannot capture the fullness of the experience.   I’m going to risk that this morning.

It was a cold December night as I sat in my little office at home in New Haven, Connecticut.  My wife, Laura, was out, practicing with the chamber orchestra.  I was coming to the end of my first semester in seminary, and that evening I felt like I needed to take inventory of “how I was doing.”  Had I prayed enough?  In just the weekdays of life in the seminary, one could attend at least 12 worship services, not including worship at whatever church you find yourself attached to.  No one expects you to go to every opportunity to pray.  Still, I thought, could I have gone to more?  How was I doing in my classes?  Could that have been better?  Have I been the type of person I could be proud of during that time?  Was I living up to my own expectations? I was finding problems all over the place, which is not a surprise for me.

I am my own worst critic.  I am incredibly hard on myself.  It is one thing to have your own inner critic, like a backseat driver for your life sometimes pointing out inconvenient truths.  It is another thing to say that you are your own judge, jury, and prosecutor, and the defense never showed up. At its worst, with critique run rampant, one feels like an imposter going through life hiding from others.  Others may talk about how well-put-together you may seem, but on the inside you feel a nagging sense of smallness, and hypocrisy, and phoniness. Failures can become all-consuming.  Imperfections are exaggerated.  Does this sound familiar to anyone else?  Perhaps not as severe?

I had set aside time and readied a space to do this introspective work because I remembered the work of Howard Thurman, an African American pastor who inspired much of MLK’s theology.  He was also a mystic, and his devotional material is praiseworthy 70 years after the fact.  In regards to the necessities of introspective work, he once wrote that:

If we were to try silence in prayer, we may discover that the discomfort we feel are the dark parts of our soul rising to consciousness. Our failings, our senses of inadequacy, our regrets come to the fore because we have deliberately chosen to no longer drown them out. It is difficult to sit with these thoughts for long, almost unhealthy to do so. But in a context of prayer, we hold ourselves up for our own introspection and we also hold ourselves up to God. These are aspects of our human condition that we would rather hide from God, from others, and from ourselves. Yet it is better to acknowledge realities, and in the presence of a God and Spirit who is willing to follow us into the depths of our being, the very core of our soul. We will find God forgiving and understanding. Once we get past our discomfort with ourselves and learn to rest in the love and presence of God, the conversation can begin.

It is a place where one attempts to drop all walls, all self-deceptions, all excuses, and lay bare one's self before God.  It would be despairing, if there were not something to break the fall.  All doubts, all false certainties, all attempts at self-justification, all hatreds of oneself; they fall away.  One is left with God.  

And so there I was--sitting in my office, dark except for a single candle illuminating a cross and a hand labyrinth before me.  After a period of time in silence, and cataloguing my faults, something happened, something that became my barometer for knowing how close I am to God in particular instances.  In those moments the direct experience of God—the description of which varies for many people--most resembled a dark buoyancy.  It felt safe and calm. I called it, and continue to call it, "the womb of God."

What became so clear in those moments when I had finished listing all of my faults—what God gave to me with the most intimate knowledge possible is that I am broken, yet beloved.  The distance between God and me became clear—and yet it was also clear that God was and is joined to me, and I am in God. One finds parts of one's very being transfigured.  Changed.  God gives a simultaneous yes and no that both affirms belovedness while calling one to the fullness and likeness to Christ we are called to be.

In those moments, bread from Heaven tasted like love, unconditional love, filling me with a sense of my belovedness even as I was being moved to consider more deeply the full humanity God was calling me to live into. I could intellectually assent to that belovedness before; but after that experience, I knew it. 

That is what the bread of Life looked like to me: an experience of God that cut through my anxiety about how well I was doing at life, as though my performance was the sole source of earning God’s love.  I thank God for such a sweet morsel of the bread of life, for the memory of it has sustained me through dark and difficult days.  And occasionally, I find crumbs that manage to fill left for me along the path my life takes me—little reminders of the awesomeness of God’s love and care and presence. 

There were a couple of reasons I am reticent to tell you this story this morning.  I’ve already mentioned one:  putting the experience into words can sometimes betray the fullness of the experience.  There are two other reasons that are pet peeves.

The first is this:  I distrust leaders and spiritual virtuosos who claim their abilities and exclusive access to constant revelation as reasons for others to listen to them.  Jonestown shows one end of that road to such an appeal to the power of the divine.

The second is this:  there is always a danger that following the truth of the Gospel can lead to a claim of Christian superiority to which everyone must defer.  Such an attitude of superiority is opposed to the truth that God’s self-revelation in Christ should ultimately lead to service, not to an entitlement to be acclaimed.

These two pet peeves point to some problems Christians have.  We run the spiritual risk of thinking we can decide who is worthy of God.  We can claim that we have exclusive access to the mind of God, and so we have no need to listen to our neighbors.

Our spiritual disposition matters greatly when we try to live out our faith or share it others— and Christians are finding that those to whom we speak are becoming more adept at comparing our own rhetoric to some understanding of the faith we follow. 

I believe the antidotes to such problems are found in the sentiments of Daniel Thambyrajah Niles, a Methodist pastor who once noted that, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”^[1]

Let’s come back to that in a moment.

I want to talk a little bit about the gospel text. 

We are in the middle of a five week run of Jesus talking about bread.  This conversation Jesus is having started when he turned the few loaves and fishes into a feast as a sign of the kingdom to come.  The crowds start following Jesus around, and Jesus begins interpreting the sign of the loaves and fishes to the crowd.  Jesus fed them for a day, but Jesus is offering them something more substantial.  Bread—an essential element of the diet of so many cultures—becomes the metaphor of a relationship to God the Father through Jesus Christ.  The sustenance we gain by our daily bread is a pale comparison to the participation in the divine life we are offered through relationship to Jesus Christ. 

Jesus is talking about eternal life, but a heavenly destination is not all we are called to.  We later learn in this gospel that we are called to participate in the divine life of the triune God.  We know this through other metaphors Jesus gives us: he is the vine and we the branches in John 17, and the unique mystical dance we participate with each person of our triune God:  Of which Jesus prayed to the father saying “"The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me (John 17:22).”  When Jesus tells us that eternal life is available through believing in him, this is not simply a matter of belief in a set of propositions about God.  It is about our trust in a relationship that brings us into the divine life, through which we see the world as God sees it.  We know shape of this life when we respond to the call to love God and our neighbors.[2]

What Christ offers to us—this possibility of a deep relationship with the divine—is a gift.  It is not an achievement on our part.  It is not something we can earn, it is freely given by God in God’s grace; and as Jesus said, it is grace offered to all, for the prophets tell us that ‘all shall be taught by God.'  It is both an unsettling and comforting thought: 

“Salvation, Enlightenment, Eternal Life, Wisdom, are not the products of human endeavour as our bread is…[and this is] foreshadowed by the manna of the wilderness and now fully revealed in [Christ]; the bread of life is offered to all who are hungry enough to trust that five barley loaves and two fish can feed a multitude… There is nothing to achieve or to do. Which means you cannot decide or designate who gets some and who doesn’t.”[3]

This brings us back to our quote from D.T. Niles.  At its truest understanding, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”  We are not the bakers of the living bread.  Nor are we the distributors of the living bread, and as such we are not at liberty to decide who is worthy to receive the bread.  A Christian’s joy in having risked a relationship with the divine is not license to set the conditions for another person’s access to that relationship.  No, our joy is in telling all we meet that there is something better to be found, that there is living bread that satisfies hungers our world creates and leaves unfulfilled.

The bread of life we are offered is the life of Christ given for this world so that all may know the love of God and the life eternal—That is what is offered to all. But the hunger that bread satisfies may look different for you. For me, the bread of heaven is knowing that perfection is admirable but impossible under my own striving, and that I cannot exist or act apart from the love of God.  What might the bread of heaven taste like for you?  How might you share with someone where you found such bread?     

---

[1] D.T. NILES, New York Times, May 11, 1986

[2] Martin Luther, “On Faith and Coming to Christ”, #20, http://web.archive.org/web/20030210182718/www.markers.com/ink/mlonfaith.htm.

[3] Peter Woods, http://thelisteninghermit.com/2012/08/07/what-beggars-know-about-bread-john-635-51-ordinary-19b/ .

"Truthing" in Love

Proper 13 Year B RCL

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a

Psalm 51:1-13

Ephesians 4:1-16

John 6:24-35

---

…Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.

If you are like me, you might cringe every time you read or hear the phrase "speak the truth in love." I think this is because the main way I run across the phrase is in blog posts and open letters on social media that take one’s opponents to task over an issue. And if you are like me, you might have found that what follows the author’s promise that they “speak the truth in love” is neither truthful, nor loving.  Typically, it signals one person publically telling another, “if you do not have the same opinion as I do, it is my task to correct you, and if you do not heed the correction, you are no longer in community, communion, or have been judged to have left the faith.”  In other words, when someone decides to write an open letter, and it contains the phrase “speaking the truth in love,” it is typically said in the context of an ultimatum to change or be cast away.  As a result, there are many who hear this phrase and wonder if it can be salvaged from its use as a blunt brutalizing tool that masks disdain at the least and malice at the extreme, all the while hidden behind solemn tones and counterfeit piety.

There is a longer conversation to be had regarding the overuse, abuse, and trivialization of some passages of scripture.  The way out of such situations that seems too easy, however, is to pretend the passages are not there and consign them to simply being read in worship without comment.  That unfortunately leaves the passages to those who would continue to weaponize scripture against their opponents, and that will not do.  It would also impoverish our own understanding of what it is we are reading.  Every generation is called to the proclamation of the Gospel in their own time and place, and to find the words to do so in conversation with sacred scripture. Finding those fresh expressions of the truth and looking for the world God is bringing forth will necessarily involve stripping away from our tradition and interpretation of scriptures the rot that has left by time, by abuse, and by carelessness bred by familiarity.

So, how does one get beyond the phrase’s abuse? Given that even within Christianity there are different claims to truth, and that Christians of all stripes at least agree that the truth should be spoken (and lived!), I'm curious about what sort of salvaging needs to happen with this phrase, this “speaking truth in love.” 

I think the first thing that needs to happen is to look at our passage from Ephesians in context.  What might the author, who may have been Paul or a disciple of Paul, have wanted it to mean? Throughout Ephesians Paul is making a case for a mystical unity in Christ that should characterize the relationship of the church.  It is the type of relationship that breaks down barriers.  The recipients of this letter were most likely Gentile Christians instead of Jewish believers.  Paul is reminding them that these two distinct people, Jews and Gentiles, two groups who hated each other in most other contexts would not even deign to eat together, have become one new humanity, writing that “Christ might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.”[1]  Christ brought down the dividing wall.  This is the reality of God’s ministry of reconciliation, and it would have been a shocking image.  No one is thrown out.  No one is cast aside.  Everyone is invited. 

Many of the letters we find in the Bible contain a moral exhortation that stems from proclamation. This letter is no different and our passage today is the hinge between the theology and the ethical expectations that flow from the theology.  “Through the Cross, Christ has unified ethnic groups so that peace should ensue and hostilities cease, creating what Ephesians calls “one new humanity,” which has singular access to God through one Spirit.”[2]  This unity is further emphasized by what it is that we share:  one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God who is parent of everyone.

And through Christ we are given gifts, for the purpose of building the body of Christ. But the gifts are different.  Our varied gifts that we have by the Spirit speak to a unity with diversity.  This is unity without uniformity, and it is a marvelous thing that is difficult to maintain.  It requires every effort on the part of the baptized to create spaces of grace where diversity in life and practice are honored.  Diversity here is not just a slogan that one would slap on church sign, or the kind of diversity that find its expression in a shallow tokenism that pays homage to difference while shying away from the opportunity to be changed by an encounter with the Holy one could not imagine before.  We are instead talking about the recognition, acceptance, practice, and celebration of gifts and people given to the community for the building up of the body of Christ.[3]

This radical vision of unity is a reality difficult to live into.  With that Paul’s letter points to necessary elements, one of which is humility.  The necessity for humility comes from the fact that we all have different gifts that bring us into contact with varied truths about God’s work in the world. We are finite beings, and no one has the total picture of God’s work and purpose at any given time. Our diversity, our gifts and experiences, shows us all aspects of God’s good purposes; and the call to unity in one body and community is to give us the ability to listen and discern a truth greater than we can know on our own.

Now--The passage about speaking truth in love is a part of warning; namely that the Christians ought to be in the process of “growing up” in faith and truth, and the community must be wary of attempts pull them to a truth lesser than the vision God has for them and the world.   

What is interesting about the phrase of “speaking truth in love,” however, is this:

‘Speaking the truth in love’ is not the best rendering of his expression, for the Greek verb makes no reference to our speech. Literally, it means, ‘truthing in love’, and includes the notions of ‘maintaining’, ‘living’ and ‘doing’ the truth.[4]

Following the truth includes speech and conduct. How else to avoid hypocrisy Christians are so famous for when we deceive ourselves and do the very things we hate?

No; “Truthing in love” isn’t simply a matter of talking, it’s also about doing. [5]  And truth cannot be separated from love. 

On the one hand, one cannot simply speak the truth, as though one were a cosmic referee looking to cut folks down, more concerned with purity than growth in Goodness. Indeed some find it easy to speak truth, to set others straight on how it is, to verbally assault others and then feel deserving of a spiritual reward for braving such enemy territory to deliver truth.  Some people speak truth as a way to show-off or one-up one another.[6]  This is speaking truth out of egotism, not humility. And love is lost in the process. 

“On the other hand, others excel in a type of “love” that produces only warm feelings and smiles, and, therefore, can neither broach nor tolerate truth.  In that case, truth and love are opposing forces are opposing forces, and truth must lose.”[7]  This is not good enough, for a multitude of concrete harms to others can occur because of the confusion of nicety and politeness for love and kindness.

Both truth and love are necessary and symbiotic to create a community that is unified and grounded in goodness while seeking to be a vision of God’s reign among us.  Both truth and love are necessary for our life together among each other, and they are gifts we offer to a world.

So how do we translate this into life today? How do we speak truth in love, or rather, grow into being truth in love?  How do we avoid the pitfalls of speaking truth without love, or refusing to speak when something should be said in both our personal relationships and our life in this world?

I think one interpretive key is to look at the description of love 1 Cor. 13(4-7), and refresh ourselves on what love looks like: 

Love is patient and kind; is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

It turns out the passage isn’t just for weddings! 

To remember what love would look like, it may be worth taking a look at this passage whenever we feel that it is time to speak a truth to someone.  Love will listen, love will hope that truth comes out, love will seek the substance behind our perception of the surface level in humility and care. 

Relationship matters. Remember, the theme of author’s thought in this letter is unity.  Speaking truth in love is not found in making an ultimatum that holds the relationship hostage to the other’s recognizing the truth, or failure to do so.  It may mean that when we speak the truth we discover, or the truth is not recognized, we maintain relationship as much as possible, short of being complicit in the harm we see occurring in personal relationships or our life together in this world.  In other words, there is a duty to hope for redemption, for we follow of God of second chances, even infinite chances as we make our walk toward a truth more perfectly known.

So far, I’ve talked about this phrase in its more punitive uses.  But,  look, there is something else that needs to be said about speaking truth in love.  Paul frequently wrote about the need for encouragement.  Sometimes, speaking the truth in love may include helping someone remember the love God has for them when they forget it.  Or a word of thanks for a particular gift they bring about in the world. 

So, where might you see an opportunity to be truthful in love, in action and in word?

When you are confronted by the need to say something both true and painful, how might you do so to heal, and not to hurt the other?

May our discernment of truth and love lead us closer to the purpose of God.

[1] Eph 2:15-16.

[2] Jaime Clark Soles, “Ephesians 4:1-16, Homiletical perspective” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3,  307.

[3] This paragraph largely follows and borrows phrasing from Richard F. Ward, “Ephesians 4:1-16, Homiletical perspective” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3,  307.

[4] John Stott, quoted by Dan Wilkenson (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unfundamentalistchristians/2015/07/speak-the-truth-in-love/) and confirmed in The Interpreters Bible, Vol. 10, pg.  694.

[5] Dan WIlkenson (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unfundamentalistchristians/2015/07/speak-the-truth-in-love/).

[6] This paragraph largely follows and borrows phrasing from Jaime Clark Soles, “Ephesians 4:1-16, Homiletical perspective” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3,  307.

[7] Jaime Clark Soles, “Ephesians 4:1-16, Homiletical perspective” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3,  307.