The Right Gear for the Job

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.26.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Ephesians 6:10-20

It helps to have the right gear.   As a pastor, for instance, that gear involves bibles and study bibles and bible journals and books about the bible and books about the books about the bible.  Some of us also have books of rude limericks about bible characters, but the less that is said about that the better.

You’ve just gotta love biblical scholarship.  It makes understanding texts like today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus so much easier.  In reading through some of the latest thinking about Paul’s letter to the church of Ephesus, for example, you would discover three interesting things.  First, it’s probably not written by Paul.  Second, it may not have been written to the church at Ephesus.  And third, it may not have been a letter. 

Other than that, things are pretty much as they seem.

This letter-ish thingummy is one of what Bible scholars call “deutero-Pauline” writings.  That means that it was most likely not written by the Apostle Paul himself, but by one of his disciples writing in his name.    Scholars believe this for a variety of reasons.  Ephesian 2:20, for example, seems to assume that the apostolic period is over, which would be odd had the Apostle Paul been the one writing it.

Then there’s the writing style.  Paul had a very consistent voice, style, and vocabulary.  Paul was a sharp and brilliant rhetorician, whose prose is elegant and readable.   The author of Ephesians also had particular style and vocabulary, one shared by Colossians.  One of the more notable features of that style is a tendency to layer words on top of words that mean the same thing, like saying “..in the strength of his power.”  There’s also a tendency to spin out some really, really long sentences.   For instance, we have this one sentence from Ephesians 1, which is, in the Greek, the single longest sentence in all of scripture:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love, he destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth, for in Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory, for in him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit, the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.

The New Revised Standard Version breaks that out into six sentences, both for readability and because having liturgists pass out while trying to read it is a liability issue.  This is clearly not Paul writing.

Even if this isn’t written by Paul, it’s still clearly written from the perspective of someone who was formed in the crucible of Paul’s teaching.  From that foundation, the author of this letter presents us with how we are to deal with life, once we’ve had the audacity to assert that we are disciples of Jesus Christ.

A significant part of that is the recognition that the journey of faith is not all butterflies and cute widdle puppies.   Ephesians is an eminently practical book.  The faith it teaches engages with and shapes the actual life we lead, and life ain’t easy.    Into that reality, the writer of Ephesians pitches out a series of metaphors for what it takes to cope with the things we struggle with in this world.   

For imagery, he goes to the world of armor, and specifically the armor that would have been worn by a Roman soldier.   The “shield of righteousness,” for example, was a thyreos.  This wasn’t a little round buckler, but a large curved rectangular thing, behind which you could hide your entire body.   The shoes for one’s feet would have been hobnailed sandals or short boots, perfect for both traction and protection.

It might seem to some a bit odd talking about wearing the hobnailed war boots of peace,  in the same way that it would be weird talking about wielding the Cheap Chinese Knockoff Kalashnikov of Love.   But I do get armor as a metaphor, perhaps because I wear armor several times a week.

Negotiating the Capital Beltway during the height of rush hour on a motorcycle might not be quite the same thing as fending off a ravening horde of orcs, but it’s close enough.  Every once in a while, I’ll see a fellow rider trucking on by in sandals, shorts and a t-shirt, and one of those little beanie helmets.  I don’t get this.  If you were riding a bicycle on a giant high-speed 80 grit belt-sander in the midst of a herd of charging rhinoceroses, you’d want as little exposed flesh as possible.  Few things are better reminders of how fragile we are as human beings.   Up-armoring yourself just makes sense.

The armor needs of motorcycling are a little different than the needs of first century combat, but the concept still stands.  For riders, there are two primary things that motorcycle armor needs to do.  It needs to protect against abrasion, and it needs to protect against impact.

Abrasion is the belt-sander part of the equation, the road that can inflict road-rash as you slide across its surface at sixty seven miles an hour.  In a slide across asphalt at highway speeds, that can be forty or fifty yards.   Jeans wear through after five yards.  That isn’t fun.  To avoid this, riding armor needs to be stronger than flesh.  Leather works well, but high-tensile strength ballistic nylon is equally effective, letting you slide to a stop unharmed.

Impact is the other part.  If you’re thrown from the bike, you can come down really fast, much faster than our Creator intended the human body to fall.  Here, motorcycling armor...and most particularly the helmet...needs to absorb the blow.  Oddly enough, a really really strong and indestructible helmet is not your friend.  Rigid and inflexible helmets were made for a while back in the 60s, and it was found that they do one of two things on impact.  They can transfer the energy to the head inside them, which is bad.  Alternately, they bounce.  If your head is inside them, this is equally bad.  You need a helmet that absorbs the blow, allowing itself to be destroyed so that you can survive.

It’s not quite as martial, but I think the writer of Ephesians would have appreciated the value of a good motorcycle riding gear metaphor. 

There are times in life when you fall, and you fall hard.   Having a faith that can take the impact of that blow is a good thing, so that the mess of your self isn’t splattered all Humpty Dumpty over the cold cold ground.  There are also times in faith that you fall, and the fall doesn’t end right away.  You slide for a while, across the existential asphalt of your life.   So to speak.   Those times can last longer than we could stand on our own, and abrade us down to nothing.  Those can be deep, deep wounds, against which a robust faith is absolutely essential.

Those aren’t the terms we hear in Ephesians, but the basic principle that is being taught in this passage is the same.   Ephesians, as a book of practical theology, teaches that the journey of Christian faith is not a short one.   It requires engagement with the world, which will involve encounters with the brokenness and darkness that will inevitably test and challenge us.

In those inevitable encounters, a robust and flexible faith is absolutely essential.   It’s the right gear for the job, worth seeking, and worth having.   So seek it, and armor yourself round about with it, because our journey is both long and challenging.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Little Shot of Jesus

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

08.19.2012; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 6:51-58

Life is full of moments, so very full of them.  Days go by, moments go by, and so many of them fly by without us even noticing.

Then there are those special moments, those times that are more potent than others.  If they are ritual moments, they are repetitions that reinforce a sense of identity.  We all have those simple rituals, those things we do as part of the pattern of our weeks or of our years to reaffirm a place or a time or a relationship.  Those can be birthdays, or anniversaries, or driving down to Rehoboth on the last night of a beach vacation, going to the boardwalk, and always, always, always waiting in line to ride the Funland haunted mansion.  Those moments tell us: we are here.  This is what we do.  It also tells us that fitting into the seat of that ride would probably have been easier before a week filled with huge buckets of beach fries and chocolate peanut-butter ice cream.

But there are other times, times that are meant not just to mark time, but to be deeper bearers of meaning, potent and powerful and transforming.  

Like, say, the communion meal we’re sharing in just a few minutes.   It’s the Lord’s Supper, that thing that Jesus told us to do together because it was important.  Down the One-Oh-Seven just about a mile or so, the folks at Our Lady of the Powerpoin...sorry, Presentation...celebrate it as Mass.  Mass here doesn’t mean a property of matter, but instead comes to us from the Latin words Ite, Missa Est.  These are the words in the ancient Roman rite that get said, at the end of a service.   They can mean either “It is finished,” “It is sent,” or “Y’all can go now,” depending in where a congregation stands relative to the Mason-Dixon line.  It’s also known as the Eucharist, which in the ancient Greek means “Good Gift.”

But what does what we’re about to do actually mean to us?   In just a few minutes, we’ll circulate the elements, the bread and the cup, the body and the blood, and...well...does it feel sacred?   Does it feel significant?  Transforming?  A time set apart?

I struggled with this, years ago, as my own faith was forming.  The church in which I grew up did things just exactly the same way we do it here, and honestly, I sometimes found it hard to connect.  Where was the purpose of this moment?  What in it spoke, of power and of meaning?  It’s such a simple, elemental representation of a meal.

A plate comes around, with a little sourdough crouton.  You take the crouton, and you hold it, and you try not to drop it, which would be awkward.  Maybe, for a moment, you forget you’re supposed to take it with everyone else, and raise it to your lips, only to quickly lower it.   If you’re really spacing out, you pop it in your mouth, and then look around and see everyone patiently waiting to eat together.  So you either try to chew it really, really slowly so no one notices, or just hold it there, waiting for it to dissolve.

And then there’s the shot of Welches, a tiny clear cup with mass-produced Concord grape juice that arrives glistening in a silver tray.   You take it, and if they pass you the tray, you briefly visualize yourself dropping the tray, which would be noisy, messy, and public in ways that would leave some significant psychological scars.

Then you hold that tiny little cup, and you wait, and you wonder, how can this be sacred?  Where can I find the purpose of what Christ taught in this?

That purpose is written all over the passage we heard from John’s Gospel this morning, although while it’s written in terms that are simple, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to grasp.    John’s Gospel is easily the richest and most spiritual of the Gospels.  It speaks most directly to the relationship Jesus has with God, to his identity, and to the purpose of his life.  It is also the Gospel that speaks most potently to the presence and nature of the Holy Spirit, God’s transforming presence in and among us.

The purpose of Christ’s time among us is laid out in John, more often than not in statements about Christ’s nature that are cast in “I am”  statements.  Using these, Jesus presents his identity in language rich in metaphor and symbolism.  This particular portion of John’s Gospel, and in particular the verses beginning in John 6:34 and running through John 6:59, this section lays out imagery that is powerfully eucharistic.  Meaning, this is where John tells us the story of the purpose of communion. 

In the verses preceding what we’ve just heard, Jesus has described himself using the phrase “I am the bread of life,” and “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”  This, unsurprisingly, confused his first century Judean listeners.  

You are the what?  They are baffled at first mostly by the idea that he came down from heaven.  We know your dad, and your mom.  We know where you grew up.  And now you tell us you’re an alien?  What?

So Jesus goes on, and explains to the confused, grumbling audience what he means. He does this by doubling down on the bread part.   “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,” he says.  And again, “...for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”  And again, “Whoever easts my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”

This does not necessarily help with the confusion.   So you’re...an...edible...alien?

The essence of what Jesus is teaching here has to do with both incarnation and the Spirit.  What he is telling us has to do with the nature of our participation in who he was, and his participation in who we are.

All those years ago, finding that meaning in the bread took a little thought.  It was the stuff of creation, as much as the body of Jesus himself was the stuff of creation.  

Hold it in your hands, and think a little bit, and marvel at what has gone into it.  The little porous polyhedron in your hand is itself an amazing miracle of God’s creation.  The light and energy from our yellow star has fallen warm on the earth.  Nourished by the fusion-light and the rain and the complex organic matter of earth, wheat has risen from seed and grown to the point of harvest.  Then the labor of humankind has harvested it, and milled it, and mixed it into dough, and baked it.   It has been brought to market, and sold, and then lovingly cut and prepared.   In this simple object lies the labor of hundreds of souls, and the life-giving richness of earth and rain, and the light of the heavens.

This is my body, says the One who speaks with God’s voice.  

But what about the little shot of Jesus?   There it sits, several milliliters of Welches.   What to make of this?  I could try to visualize it as the actual blood of Jesus, I thought, but that just made me feel a bit like Edward from Twilight.   Plus, ew.

So I would sit there, and look at the cup.   One Sunday, I was holding particularly still, peering into this tiny plastic receptacle held carefully between both of my hands, searching for meaning.  And as I stared down at that little red circle below me, I noticed that as still as I was sitting, it wasn’t still.  I wasn’t moving at all, but it was pulsing, ever so slightly.   I wasn’t moving a muscle, was barely breathing, and yet that fluid in that little cup moved.   This is because, not being a ninja, I was not able to stop the beating of my heart.  And so as my heart beat in my chest, the fluid in that little cup beat with it.

This is my blood, says Jesus.  This is my life, he is saying.  Let it be your life, too.

Each month, as we eat this simple, most elemental meal, that is what we’re asked to recall.   We are part of the amazing creation of which Christ was a part.   And we are called have our life shaped to his, his love, his mercy, his healing, his teaching, and his willingness to give of himself completely for the purposes of God’s kingdom.

Life is full of moments, so very full of them.   We forget what a gift most are, and how almost all are charged with the possibility of Christ’s joyous, transforming love.   In this meal, we are asked to remember, and to be changed, and to live.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

Enough to Go Around

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

07.29.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 6:1-21

Over this last year, the little quarter-acre patch of suburbia I call home has seen some changes.   There’ve been a few necessary modifications, like replacing the collapsed stairs that descended from the carport to the back yard, which were washed out last year during one of those every-hundred-year floodrains we’ve been getting every year lately.

But mostly, what’s changed around the house has been the garden.  For most of the decade we’ve living in our little hobbit-hole of a rambler, the best we’ve found the time to manage was a lawn.  Well, sort of a lawn  Way we figure it, so long as it’s green and you can mow it, it may as well be grass.  This year, though, we finally committed to trying to grow something, to having that patch of earth we call our own actually producing something.

And so, with some digging and prepping and mulching and planting, the spring saw the first efforts to actually grow anything in our household.  Things were not without their setbacks.  The blackberries that went into the most light-filled area of our back yard became delightful chew-toys for our dog, who was amazed that we would take a stick and so considerately plant it in the ground for her to dig up.  

You gave me a Stick?  A stick with digging?  A stick with digging and chewing?  Oh thank you thank you thank you.  

The blueberries in the front of the house fared better, although one of them succumbed to the overzealous weeding of a member of the household who shall remain anonymous.  Generally, the plant that’s right by the stick with a picture of a blueberry on it is the one that you leave in the ground, but sometimes those weeds can be tricky shapeshifting devils.  So it goes.  In a few years, the ones that remain will be producing.

The strawberries did the best.  A midnight raid by a crack team of ninja bunnies before the defensive perimeter fence was established wasn’t enough to keep them down, and now they’re cranking out a good half-dozen ripe red fresh morsels every other day.   It’s fun, having this little patch of organic sweetness out front of our carport where once only a few clumps of sickly browning japanese forestgrass grew.

Yet as the season has gone on, I’m already looking forward to next year, and to expanding our strawberry plot.  There’s plenty for us...but I find myself yearning to have more.  Because as much fun as a garden is, perhaps the most fun comes with sharing it.  If you’re growing flowers, guiding a friend through the displays of yellow and crimson is much of the pleasure.  Whether you’re growing fruit or vegetable, having something you’ve helped summon from the soil that you can give to a friend is a significant part of the pleasure of growing.

And yet for all the joy of growing and giving, sharing abundance doesn’t come easy to our culture.  Even in the face of the miracle of the abundance of creation, we still struggle with it.

The loaves-and-fishes miracle story we just heard from John’s Gospel this morning is one that is shared across all of the four Gospels.  It is told here in John, but also in Matthew 14, Mark 6, and Luke 9.  Matthew and Mark actually tell some variant of this story again, in Matthew 15 and Mark 6.  Whether this is a repetition of an old favorite story, or a similar event happened multiple times is not clear.  What is clear is that something like this was a significant part of the story of Jesus.

The reasons behind this are many, but part of the backstory of this story of abundance comes as it resonates with other, much more ancient tales.  One of the reasons it would have been told and retold was that it had strong echoes with the stories of prophets, particularly the story we heard from the book of 2 Kings.   It’s a story of Elisha, the disciple of the prophet Elijah.  He’s faced with feeding a crowd...a hundred people...with twenty loaves of bread brought from a man whose hometown is Baal-shalishah, which is just such an awesome sounding name for a town.  This seems like not quite so much of a stretch, but the people are fed.

The challenge before Jesus and the disciples is considerably more substantial.  They have no food at all, and are faced with a teeming throng of 5,000.  They first struggle with the idea of how such a group might be fed.   According to the New Revised Standard Version, Philip looks at the 5,000 and wonders if even six months wages would cover the bill.  The New International Version suggests that was eight months.  Both are trying to describe the phrase “two hundred denarii,” with a denarius being a day’s wages.

Whichever way, and no matter what caterer they got, it would still have cost them an arm and a leg.

At this point in the story, John adds a detail that the other three accounts lack.  The five loaves and two fishes are consistent, but only John tells us that they belong to a boy.   Why?  It’s not clear.  But the detail is there anyway.

And then everyone sits, and there’s a blessing, and the disciples clean up, and discover to their amazement that there are twelve baskets left over.

It’s a relatively familiar tale.  Several things are striking about this miracle story.

First is the remarkable simplicity of the event it describes.  The miracle of the loaves and fishes is viscerally material, and yet it presents very subtly.   This isn’t a cloud of fire in the heavens, or Charlton Heston standing atop a windswept rock as the Red Sea boils and opens before his over-the-top scene-chewing.  It’s not even Jesus whispering words of healing.   They bless what food they have, and then they eat, and there is enough to go around.  It’s the kind of miracle that happens right there in front of you, so simple and so basic that you don’t even realize it was a miracle until later.

Scottish mystic George MacDonald once described this as a twofold miracle, with the essential miracle being not the reproduction of food, but the mere fact of the bread and fish.  He marveled that the light from the sun falls on fields and wakes the barley, that it rises, tall, rich, and golden to meet the sun, that human beings take to those fields to harvest, and return home with sweet nutty grain to grind and bake.  That most basic miracle, the miracle of life itself and the generous abundance of creation, that miracle is the easiest of all to miss, and a thousand times more amazing than the simple division of a substance.

The second striking thing is just how miraculous even the most non-supernatural approach to this event would be.  Imagine, for a moment, that this crowd wasn’t entirely unprepared.  Not all of them had set out to hear this rabbi and wonderworker without first bringing something to eat.   Some had, in their eagerness.  But others were thinking about lunch before they left.  Encountering his grace, and hearing his blessing, and watching how he and the disciples shared what little they had, those who came did likewise.  

This is far from the only way to interpret this event.  But even this most simple explanation seems so far beyond us that it might as well be a miracle.

We produce two point three billion metric tons of grain a year on this planet,

 and another billion tons...give or take...of vegetables.

   Add to that five hundred million metric tons of fruit, and the riches of this world are still ample supply for the almost seven billion human souls who inhabit it.   And yet there is still hunger, not from a lack of providence, not because this little world of ours doesn’t have enough, but because in the face of that abundance we can’t figure it out.  One billion souls go hungry each year, and here in America we fret and worry because we’ve got an obesity epidemic.

Strange thing, given that there’s more than enough to go around.

Some miracles are just right there, waiting to be seen, and waiting to be acted upon.  The joy of growing, giving, and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given is just such a miracle.  But first, we have to be able to see it for the miracle it is.  Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.