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Proper 14
Year B RCL |
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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?
