That’s what really struck me about the Gospel reading today. It’s that great story where, toward the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus goes back to his home town. He returns to the synagogue where he grew up, (where he was probably an acolyte and a member of the youth group, all of that) and he proceeds to preach one whiz-bang of a sermon—full of really good stuff. The people in Nazareth are in bind. They realize that Jesus really has something to say, and they know that—if they take him seriously—they will need to take a hard look at their lives and at their behavior. So, they conveniently decide not to take him seriously. They decide that, since he is a local boy whom they know well, and whose family they know well, he can’t have anything important to say about God.

After all, in order to have something important to say about God you have to be different. You have to come from a long way off, and you have to be a little mysterious, a bit out of the ordinary—you have to be an expert. (A briefcase helps.) That was hardly a new attitude way back then, and it hasn’t changed much since.

It still helps a lot if you come from a ways off and have an air of mystery, or at least a lot of degrees.

So those folks in Nazareth pretty much missed the whole new thing that was happening with Jesus. It was clearly hard for him to be who he was in his home town, and, while he didn’t make much visible progress, he hung in there and did what he could.

And this is what I want to talk about. I don’t want to talk about people listening, or not listening, to the Presiding Bishop or to the Bishop or to the clergy. Instead, I want to say just a word about what Jesus discovered in Nazareth— he discovered. that it is very hard to live out any sort of commitment and witness in your home town, in the place where you live. It was very hard for Jesus.

This is I, and I suspect most of the clergy, from the Presiding Bishop on down, stand in some real awe of you, of lay folks—of what you promise to do, and where you promise to do it. After all, what Jesus had so much trouble with is exactly what you are all about. You are about living out the faith in the place where you live.

In stark contrast, like most clergy, I spend virtually all of my time not just with Christians, but with Episcopalians—the very best kind of Christians. Like most clergy, I live mainly in the world of the parish, where we share (pretty much) the same faith and the same values.

Meanwhile, our Bishops, bless their hearts, spend much, if not most, of their time, not just with Episcopalians, but with Episcopal clergy for heaven’s sake.

For all our foibles, we clergy are seldom as challenging to deal with as is a culture that is slipping farther and farther away from even a nominal consensus about matters of faith and value,

But with you it’s different. You all spend most of your time with non-Christians, or (especially in Texas) with Christians who are sometimes pretty different from us Episcopalians. You live a very special cycle. You come into this place, week in and week out, (some more weeks than others, but still) you come in here, receive the sacraments, hear the word, repeat the creed, say your prayers, and then the Deacons sends you out there, out into the real world of real people, out into Howard County, Texas, and try to make all of that real.

You live and work in a world that doesn’t care very much about what we value and say is central and you live in a culture that doesn’t even pretend to support you in what you are trying to do. You are daily a part of institutions and organizations that (to say the least) do not have the Christian faith as a part of why they exist and of what they do.\\ To me, that’s very impressive; and very important.

That’s because it is out there, in the midst of a world and a culture that is indifferent, confused, hostile, and just plain weird, it is there that you try, day in and day out, to live out the promises of your baptism.

It is there that you work at discovering what it means to persevere in resisting evil, and to proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ; it is there that you are called to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourselves, and it is there that you are called to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.

And that’s hard.

I look at what you promise to do, and at what you in fact do—and I marvel. The responsibility, and the opportunity, and everything else that goes with being a Christian lay person in our world today, al of this is really something.

There is really no contest as to who has the most difficult, the most challenging, and, in the long run, the most significant, ministry. It’s you—it’s not me, it’s not the Bishop, it’s not the Presiding Bishop. Don’t ever forget that. It is truly awesome.

Don’t ever forget that every single day you face exactly the same challenge Jesus faced in this little bible story. Every single day you come face to face with life its own self, with

reality as it is in the world out there—the world of Big Spring’s families, businesses, Board rooms, classrooms, civic groups, voting booths, workplaces, marriages, social events—it is there that the Christian faith will be lived out and revealed—if it is to be lived out and revealed at all.

Every single day, day in and day out, in the midst of people you know and who know you, (sometimes all too well) you have all the responsibilities and all the duties of Christian lay people, of that Baptismal Covenant I’ve been quoting. That’s very impressive from where I sit—or stand. And that is dreadfully important. For what you do—day after day—is really the beating heart of the mission and the work of Christ’s Church.

As with Jesus in Nazareth, that witness is not always well received, and success the way we like to measure success (with numbers) is generally difficult to come by. But that’s all right—because not only are you daily in the same situation that Jesus faced, you also have, again daily, exactly the same help that Jesus had. And you are called, as was our Lord, to hang in there and do what you can. That’s impressive, it’s important, and it will, by the grace of God, be enough.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us pretty much where they were, only with a problem they didn’t have. Just like the disciples, we have a mission. We are sent out—day by day; and we are given authority, and we are given a mission. The best single description of that is the Baptismal Covenant—our understanding of the Christian’s job description, and it summarizes our mission quite nicely. I talked about that some last Sunday.

I truly hope that we are getting close to having the thing memorized. In it, we promise to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers; to persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord; to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ; to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself; and to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. This is what we have promised to do. Like the twelve, we have a mission. We are sent by our Lord and His Church into the world as witnesses to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But we have a problem that they didn’t have.

Here it is, Right? We carry a bag. This is just one sort of bag, we all have our own bags, the places where we keep our stuff. Yours looks different. But we all have them—both inside and outside. We all have stuff that is ours that we take with us, wherever we go. Which means that we take it with us as we go on our mission as Christian people. Now, Jesus didn’t say that we couldn’t do this. That’s not the problem. The problem is that, since we have all of this stuff and we can take it with us, we have to deal with it. And most of it is stuff that can get in the way of being who we are called to be, and of living the way we are called to live.

So, what’s in here, what’s in your bag, the one you always carry? Of course, I don’t know everything that’s in your bag. But there are some things that most of us have in common. Let’s see: Here’s a checkbook. Jesus was very specific about this stuff. He even closed a loophole and said no bag and no money in your belt, (just in case they were looking for a way to split hairs and tuck in some extra security). There are all sort of ways this can get in the way of our mission. There are also all sorts of ways it can help. But it’s in most of our bags. Gotta deal with it.

What else? Here’s a good one. It’s a date book; a schedule. It tells us about our time–about what we do with our time. These little suckers can really run things, can’t they? Ever think about how the ways we spend our time and our money reveal the bald truth about our priorities, or how they effect our mission? What’s in these two things will pretty much show us what we really believe. They are very important.

Let’s see... This is a diary, an old one. It’s sort of a symbol of carrying around the past. When our bag is full of the past, it can be very heavy. This past we are toting might be full of things we did–and so we have the weight of regret and guilt. It might be full of things other people did to us, and so we get to tote around anger, or resentments, or wounds that are still festering. It might be full of the things that never happened, and that is a different heaviness. There are all sorts of ways that the past can become quite a load. It can get in the way of our mission, and of a whole lot more.

What else? Here are some great arrows. These are for pointing at other people. ‘It’s because of him!’ ‘She did it!’ ‘If it weren’t for them, then I would all be all right.’ Arrows can go really well with the diary—‘If it were not for what so and so did in the past...’ Well, you know how it goes. It doesn’t take very many of these arrows to fill up anybody’s bag. The neat thing about them is that, even though we carry the arrows in our bag (and nobody else carries the same arrows) they really aren’t our fault, we didn’t put them there, right? Great little things, these. They not only get in the way of our mission, they do it in such a way as you hardly notice.

And of course there is more, lots more. Each of us has our own stuff that fills up our bag. Oh, there is one more thing we all share. What all of these really are. They really are this. They really are a mirror. They are all forms of the idolatry of looking first and primarily at our selves. At the end of the day, that is always what fills our bag. It is full of ourselves. This is always what stands between us and our mission; between the lives we live and the faith we profess; between the promises we make when we renew our Baptismal Covenant and the things that happen to us Monday through Sunday. That’s what keeps these things so very heavy. And of course, when it really came down to it, the disciples had the same problem.

So here it is. What do we do about it. Like I said, our calling is not to toss these things—even if we could.

(Of course, there are exceptions to that. There are all sorts of plain brown wrapper stuff that may be weighting down your bag—this is the G rated version. In that case, well, some things just gotta go.)

We have to carry it, but, if we don’t want it to cripple us, to weigh us down and break us down, then we need to carry it to a higher authority. We need to carry it to a place where our bag, and all the stuff in it, can be taken, blessed, broken, and given back to us. We need to bring it here. And that’s what we do, week after week. We bring it here. We know that, but we forget sometimes.

We bring it here, and we find that nothing that is in that bag, and nothing that bag has ever caused us to do or not to do, none of that matters at all in the light of the love we see here. We find here, first of all, that God sees, and God knows, and God loves and God forgives and God sends us out as his children and as his servants. That’s what we find.

So here we all. Loaded down, slowed down, hauling around all sorts of stuff. Bring it here. That’s first, that’s necessary—sure, there’s more; but this is first. The rest will follow.

21 years ago Janice and I moved to Big Spring primarily to care for her aged mom and aunt. Needless to say they were less than excited to have 2 younger women move in with them and interrupt their routine which had been comfortably status quo for several years. I had gone to work at the VA caring for veterans of all ages—old vets set in their ways, middle-aged Vietnam vets still fighting the demons of post-traumatic stress syndrome. A typical day was like dealing with all

the emotions of 40 women experiencing PMS. Janice’s aunt was a 98 lb. 92 year old fireball who was a wee bit obstinate on a good day. I had very little patience in those days and Janice would often tell me to have a little compassion when dealing with her aunt’s antics. I remember saying, "I show compassion 8 hrs/day and I’ll be damned if I’ll show any when I get home."

Compassion—a strong word that evokes emotion. What is the definition of compassion? According to most dictionaries, compassion is defined as pity—inclining one to spare or succor—succor—to come to the assistance of, give aid to those in need or difficulty; aid given in time of need.

When humanity contemplates the compassion of Jesus, we find it beautiful and amazing, touching and motivating. In what way is the compassion of Jesus motivating?

Well, one man who was motivated by Jesus’ compassion was born in Belgium January 3, 1840. His father, a small farmer, sent him to a college to prepare for a commercial profession; but as a result of the evangelistic activities of the Redemptorists in 1858, Joseph decided to become a priest. He changed his name to Damien. He was admitted to the religious profession October 7, 1860. Three years later, though still in minor orders, he was sent to the mission of the Hawaiian Islands, when he arrived March, 1864. He was later given charge of various districts on the island of Hawaii, and animated with burning zeal, his robust constitution allowed him to give full play to the impulses of his heart. He was not only the missionary for the local people, but he also constructed several chapels with his own hands.

On the island of Molokai, a leper settlement had grown, where the government kept segregated all persons afflicted with this tragic disease. Damien requested a transfer to this Island. When he arrived at the leper colony, strong winds had decimated their settlements. He found them lying in the rain, under sodden blankets in drenched clothing. He ministered to the sick, by washing them, covering their sores and ulcers and rebuilding their huts.

He wanted to make the settlement better and make them comfortable. He taught them to farm, raise animals and play music.

After 12 years of this compassionate service he stood before them and opened his address by saying, "We lepers…" because in 1885 he had discovered in himself the first symptoms of leprosy. He nevertheless continued his compassionate work with the lepers, on the island of Molokai. On March 28, 1889, Father Damien died on Molokai, shortly after closing his 15^th year in the service of the lepers. He was 49.

It’s obvious that Damien was motivated by the compassion of Jesus.

Somehow, a dictionary definition doesn’t capture the total and implied meaning of compassion. What’s the real definition? What surges through our minds when we think of compassion?

Compassion can be:

A satisfying meal, a comforting touch; a listening ear.

Compassion can also be giving:

Compassion can be giving something you possess—something you can give. And it normally includes ourselves.

As humans, we can only begin to understand Divine Compassion when we have some comprehension of our own identity and the identity of God.

We need to ask ourselves—What am I like? Who am I really?

When we look at our character traits…it’s often a disappointment. When we take a good hard look at ourselves—there is often plenty to see that’s not very appealing.

We are sinners—loaded with defects—destined to die—hopeless and helpless—without the compassionate salvation of Jesus.

Jesus didn’t just speak about compassion. He was and remains—compassionate in action! Jesus didn’t put compassion on the agenda for others to do. When someone is compassionate, there is a cost to be paid.

Jesus with his Father was prepared and continues to be prepared to pay the exacting price of compassion.

True compassion is giving away something that we don’t have a lot of—for some it may be time, for others it may be money (similar to the widow and her mites) or energy. Remember the millennium goals to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty. (donate 0.7%).

And for One who has the time of eternity, all the gold and silver and all the oil and the energy to create countless galaxies—He didn’t give one of his millions or billions of sinless angels, He gave something he was short of—his only son—His one and only son! He had no other in reserve—He didn’t have a spare—now that’s compassion!

One of the endearing beauties of Jesus is every time Jesus was moved with compassion, he did something—He fed, he healed, he touched, he loved.

There was action—there was compassion.

Can we do any less?

Pentecost VIII, Proper 12, Year B, July 30, 2006

There are so many jokes about walking on water that it’s hard to take the whole thing seriously. But we need to do that; and a good first step is to remember, one more time, that Jesus didn’t do miracles just to show off. There was always context and meaning and purpose to them. Also, Mark chooses what he records with great care, and he includes events in his Gospel not just to talk about something that happened in the past, but also to make clear things that are true now.

Keep all that in mind while we look at the story again. Immediately after feeding the multitude, Jesus sends his disciples off in a boat, (by the way, in the Gospels, boats (especially when they are full of disciples) are almost always symbols for the Church; and every time there is a feeding story in the Gospels, it is always followed with a boat story. Anyway, Jesus sends them off, dismisses the crowd, and goes off by himself to pray.

Now, Mark only mentions Jesus at prayer three times, and each of these is a time of great crisis and of an important choice. John’s Gospel says what this crisis was. Like the disciples, the crowd of 5,000 men that Jesus fed didn’t understand about the loaves. Because of that, those folks want to make Jesus king.

They really liked the trick with the fish and the bread; and they set out to draft Jesus as a sort of permanent supply officer.

Now, this is not a bad deal. It would be an easy job, plenty of pay, high status, very little overhead (just a couple of loaves and a few fish), and an easy life—exactly what almost everyone, then and now, would consider a great career move. It drove Jesus to his knees; and after that time of prayer, Jesus deals with this temptation by leaving that place (and its search committee), and setting out to join the disciples.

Then comes the miracle. It’s just overflowing with Biblical images having to do with the power of God. To understand Jesus walking on the water, you need to remember that God separated the waters of chaos to create the world, and that Moses separated the waters of the Red Sea to create the people of Israel, and that Joshua, and Elijah, separated the waters of the Jordan to possess and to renew the land of the promise. All of these ancient connections with the power of God and control over the sea are involved in this story. Jesus comes to his disciples, to the boat, to the Church, by doing what God did at creation, by overcoming the power of the sea. By doing this, Jesus reveals in Himself the full authority and power of the Father.

The disciples, who were, as usual, straining against the wind, were terrified. They were sure Jesus was somewhere else—off praying, or being king, or even suddenly dead. They expected to be left alone in the boat. So they were surprised, and amazed, and utterly astounded. That’s because they did not understand about the loaves.

And for all the spectacular, symbolic, and powerful stuff that went into the business of walking on the water; that walk is not the most important part of this story. There is something more amazing than that going on, something more powerful.

The real heart of the story is not that Jesus walked on the water then—it is that the loaves, and everything they mean, are with us now.

The crowd did not understand, and they wanted Jesus as king.

The disciples did not understand, and they were amazed.

As we gather, week after week, to celebrate the Eucharist; and as we are sent out, week after week, to love and serve the Lord, we are called to understand about the loaves.

To understand about the loaves means that we begin to realize first and always, that Jesus is with us, no matter how bad the storm, no matter how far from land our little boat may be, no matter how impossible the trip from where Jesus is to where we are may seem, he is with us.

To understand about the loaves also means that we begin to realize that everything Jesus gives us, every free lunch we pick up on a hillside, every gift that makes up our lives, every blessing of every sort, indeed, everything that God offers to us—none of these goodies is, in itself, what is most important. What is most important is that it is all a sign to us of the one great gift: The gift of God Himself—the gift of relationship with him. To seek just a gift, or to stop at any gift—like that crowd that wanted Jesus to be a bread-king—to do this is to trade the best for the good—and to lose sight of what is really important. To want what God gives us so much that we lose sight of God Himself, to do this is to impoverish ourselves. All we have is given us so tat we may be drawn closer to God.

At the same time, to understand about the loaves is to expect (like the disciples) to be sent off somewhere.

It is to realize that the Lord will have us move away from the security of whatever table he sets for us—and that he will call us to new directions, and to some task or another that will have us straining at the oars, in places where he himself seems absent. Never forget that all the feeding stories in the Gospels are connected to boat stories.

To understand about the loaves is to realize that what we do at this table has to do with the same power, the same majesty, the same love, the same presence that both the crowd on the mountain and the disciples in the boat knew and saw.

For here our Lord feeds us—and the heart of that feeding is not the gift of bread—but the gift of Christ himself, a gift that is never withdrawn, never lost, never left behind, never overpowered, and never conquered.

To understand about the loaves is to realize that whatever fears we may have can be met by the love we are given from our Lord; it is to realize that whatever powers are grinding us to a halt can and will be met by an ever greater power; and that whatever journey we are on will be ended safely.

To understand about the loaves is to know that whatever situation, dilemma, problem or storm we face, wherever we may be, Jesus is within easy walking distance, and he will make the trip—and we are not alone.

The disciples saw that Jesus was with them—and they were very surprised, and they were frightened. We are called to expect the Lord to be with us, no matter what, and to take heart—Because we are also called to understand about the loaves.

As a sort of prelude to the Transfiguration, I want to rant and rave a little bit about a theme I started last week, when I talked about Jesus’ walking on the water—it’s also a familiar theme, but one we need constantly to remember as we try to take the Bible, and especially the Gospels, seriously.

Too often these days I keep running into the notion that what matters most about stories from the Bible, especially stories that are unusual—miracles, healings, or just plain peculiar stuff, like the Transfiguration, is that you believe it, that you think it really happened. And that bothers me for a couple of reasons. First of all, it trivializes the Bible by turning it into a sort of believing contest; and second, it impoverishes these special stories by setting them apart from everything else and pretending that the most important thing about them is that they happened. That’s silly.

Sure, there are all sorts of interesting textual and historical issues with stories like the Transfiguration—it may have been a post-resurrection appearance that got misplaced in early manuscripts, it may be a theologically inspired parable that developed in the first century, and so on. But that’s not what matters most. At the same time, there is simply no reasonable doubt that Jesus did amazing things, and that life around him was very interesting and full of surprises. But that’s not what matters most, either. We all know that God can do special stuff.

These perplexing stories are really just exactly like the more ordinary stuff in the Gospels—things like Jesus’ teachings, his sayings about himself and about God and the Kingdom of God. After all, the most important thing about, say, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is not that Jesus actually said those words. The most important thing about them is what they mean—what they meant for the people, place, and time where they were said, and what they mean for us in this place and time.

It’s not enough just to believe the Bible (whatever that means); we are called to engage the struggle of trying to understand it—of trying to make it real and present for us in ways that matter to our lives and to our world. After all, the strong conviction that unusual things happened a long time ago in a place far, far away, really doesn’t say anything at all about our lives now; no matter how hard we believe it. Such unexamined belief is also an easy way out, a way of dismissing the meaning of something by simply saying we believe it, and stopping there.

O.K., that’s the end of my little rant—but do keep this in mind when you read, and when you hear people talk about, the Bible.

On to the Transfiguration. It’s a story about who Jesus is, and what it is like to follow Jesus, and, mostly, it’s a story about hope, real hope. We know that the Church has taught from the very beginning that Jesus is fully a human being, and at the same time, fully divine. These days, with the safety of distance and, alas, of centuries of sugary art and decades of terrible movies, it is pretty easy to think of Jesus as being divine—but we can have trouble with how that fits in with his being fully human. (So people worry about silly things like whether Jesus could speak English if he were pressed, or if, the week before the Last Supper, he knew who would win the 2008 Presidential election.)

But in his own lifetime, and during the lifetime of the Apostles, there was no doubt about Jesus’ humanity. People saw him and talked with him and ate with him and watched him live the live of a man in first century Palestine. And, no, he didn’t glow in the dark or walk around looking all Hollywood goofy and godly. So the Transfiguration was, in the first century, a story about the divinity of Jesus. It was there to remind people that this man they may have known and may have seen was more than just one more charismatic teacher. He was the beloved of God in a unique and powerful way—the full glory of the Father was part of who Jesus—this guy they knew—actually was. That’s one part of what the story means, a part that was probably more important in the first century than it is today.

Another part of what the story means is that Jesus trumps the Bible. Really. Moses and Elijah symbolized the Law, the first five book of what we call the Old Testament, (which was the only Bible the Apostles or the early Church knew), and Elijah symbolized the Prophets, who made up pretty much the rest of that Bible. So, for the Law and the Prophets to be there, but to vanish and then for the disciples to be told to listen to Jesus alone, this is one way of saying that, if you have to choose between the Law and the Prophets (the Bible of the day) or Jesus, you choose Jesus. There is a clear priority here; and while the point is not to ignore Moses or Elijah, it is to show who has precedence. As Ephrem the Syrian, a fourth century commentator says, "Moses and Elijah appeared beside [Jesus] so that they might know that he was Lord of the Prophets." We need to remember that, too. Jesus trumps Moses and Elijah. That part of the story was very important to the early Church, as it tried to figure out how to handle the Old Testament, and it is a very important thing for us to remember, too. (By the way, that’s one reason Peter was not to build three booths—doing that would suggest that Jesus was only equal to the Law and the Prophets.)

A third part of what the story means was so obvious to the Apostles and the early church that they hardly noticed it—they knew it all along, down to their very bones. But it may be the most important part for us. This is the reality that who Jesus really is cannot be known from only one picture, from only one experience (no matter how intense and glorious), or from only one perspective. Coming to know Jesus is not an event, it is a journey. You can’t stop with just one "wow" and assume you’ve got it. Jesus left the mountain, still a mystery and a puzzle to the disciples, who were told not to blab about this partial insight into the Lord.

That’s because even the Transfiguration did not give enough light to see Jesus clearly. To see him fully required the whole journey, it required walking the road ahead, all of that road. And it is only by making the whole of their journey with Jesus, a journey they did not anticipate and could not have imagined, a journey that led to Golgotha and beyond, it was only by doing this that they came to realize both who Jesus really was, and how confused and incomplete any attempt to pin him down to any one moment would be. They could no more point to the Transfiguration than they could to a sleeping friend or an executed criminal and say—"this is it, this is who he is, I’ve figured it all out." That’s why the Gospels have lots and lots of stories and sayings. No single one is enough, no single experience is enough; and no one can know the whole of who Jesus is and what he is about until that person has walked all of that person’s entire journey with Jesus.

In fact, the whole Church cannot know fully who Jesus is until the whole Church has walked its entire journey with Jesus, a journey we are still walking, a journey that is far from over.

Again, they knew that, back then; but we need to be especially mindful of this reality. The one who stands transfigured before us today, and crucified on Good Friday, and raised on Easter, and who is with his Church forever, this one, Jesus himself, is still leading us along the bumpy road down the mountain, patiently putting up with our wrong turns, our stubborn blindness, and our failures to trust enough or to love enough. We cannot stop at any one place and say "here it is, we have it all nailed down" (that’s the other reason Peter could not build a dwelling for Jesus). As long as we are in the midst of the journey, Jesus has not set up a permanent address among us. We don’t know it all; and we pretend to do so at our peril.

The journey of faith, the journey of discovery, the journey of our lives and of the life and ministry of Jesus, these continue. And on that journey, Jesus is for us both our companion on the way, gradually revealing to us and to our generation who he is and who he will have us to be, and at the same time, to use Peter’s words, he is for us "a lamp shining in a dark place", in our dark places, and in the darkness of the world.

That is where our hope lies; for that light will never fail us, no darkness will never overcome us, and this journey of ours, a journey we share with all who are Christ’s, this journey will, at the end of the day, lead us safely home. To believe in the Transfiguration is not merely to talk about history—to believe in the Transfiguration is to dare our own journey with Jesus, and it is to embrace this hope.

How would you do it; how would you teach someone that we do not live by bread alone? What would you give someone to make them understand this? My first thought would probably be to give them a sermon, or a lecture, or to arrange a spiritual experience. Or we could have a really good adult education class, with professional videos and directions to break into small groups and go over some discussion questions—maybe that would do it. How about it? What would you give someone so they could understand that we do not live by bread alone?

What God gave the people was bread. Manna was bread, or enough like bread to make no real difference. They ate it and it kept them alive. They couldn’t live without it. But isn’t that peculiar? Why give bread to make people understand that they do not live by bread alone? Of all the things to give, why give the one thing that seems to prove that you can live by bread alone—namely bread?

I suspect that this was the most important part of the whole business of Israel’s being in the wilderness, of their being formed as the people of God. Because if they couldn’t get this, if they couldn’t figure out what was going on with the manna, well, then, it was all pretty much hopeless.

The wilderness, any wilderness, is a time of crisis; and it is a time when absolutely basic things are made especially clear. God gave Israel bread in such as way that it was obvious that the bread was pure gift. They didn’t make it, they didn’t work for it, they didn’t pay for it, and they couldn’t save it up. It just happened, each day for that day only, there it was. So Israel had the chance to look at bread, at the stuff of life, with clarity; and to see beyond that thing, and to see it as a sign of God’s love and of God’s call to life with him. So the bread, which was essential, was able to draw them past itself, and past the people and their needs, and so on to God. The thing (the bread) meant more than what it was all by itself. After all, if the only purpose of the manna was to keep them alive, then they really did live by bread alone, and so do we.

But if the manna, if the stuff that God give us so that we can live, if this is given us, not just to keep us alive, but also to draw us to God and to life with God, then we do not, and we cannot, live by bread alone. The fact that God feeds us means that we have value, and purpose, and that what happens to us and through us is of real and personal concern to the very heart of the universe. But the only thing that can really show us that we do not live by bread alone is bread. Anything less vital, anything less essential, would allow us to cling to life for its own sake, and so make all questions of meaning secondary, and avoidable. Life, life itself, is God’s great gift, not because life is the most important thing in the world for us, but just exactly because it is not—God, and life with God, is most important.

All of Jesus’ talk of being the bread of life is about this. The manna was given so that people could be drawn past all good things, to God, who gives and loves and calls to service. What being drawn to God looks like now, what that means now, is to be drawn to Jesus—who by giving himself as bread for the life of the world offers us new life and calls us to service.

We see this with special clarity at the Altar, where the bread we receive is clearly not about itself alone; but is hooked to something much greater. ||So we can look with awe and reverence upon something as simple as this thin, tasteless wafer, because we know it to be sign, symbol and presence of something much greater than flour and water. But the sign, symbol and presence of something much greater is not just this—it is everything we have. Each time we come here, we are given another chance to understand about the loaves, about what is being said in Deuteronomy and in John’s Gospel.

Part of the point of this bread, the bread of the Eucharist, like that of the manna, is to teach us that we do not live by bread alone. This bread is special so we can understand that all bread, all that we have, all that is necessary for life, is special. It is all given us as a sign, symbol, and occasion of God’s love. It is here to draw us past itself and past ourselves, so that we, seeing both the gift and the giver, will respond to the giver in love and in service. (This is all another way of saying that creation is sacramental, but that’s another sermon.)

So it all gets jumbled up: the bread we eat every day, and Israel’s manna in the wilderness, and our weekly Eucharist, and the broken body of the Lord which is somehow what all of the others are really about. They all run together.

Here is one way to get at all of this. There is an old rabbinic admonition that insists, of anything, "if you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you." The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the people and the things of your life, if you don’t give thanks for it, it’s bad for you. So, if you have enough to eat, and the strength to go on for another day, and people who care about you, if you have all of that (and we all have that and much more) and you don’t give thanks for it—then it’s bad for you, all of it.

It is poisoning your soul, and shrinking your life. Really.

That’s because giving thanks for something puts it in its proper place, it places the thing as part of our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us. That’s where things, all things, properly belong. Any thing, especially bread, is understood properly only when it is understood in relationship to God.

On the other hand, if we give thanks for it, then it’s good for us. If we give thanks for it, then every part of our lives, especially the essential parts, can draw us beyond itself and toward the only source of meaning and hope that makes any sense.

It is very easy to forget this. It is very easy to value the things of creation and of our lives for themselves—to take them outside the context of a relationship with God. When we do this, when we see only what is right in front of us and no more, then we are impoverished, we are barely living on the surface of our lives and of our world.

That’s what it means to live by bread alone. It means to see no farther than the things themselves, and so to miss the presence and the love and the call of God that are really a part of every piece of bread we have.

So God gave Israel bread, and God gives us bread, God gives us all we need for life, so that we may be drawn beyond all of these and see more than we would see otherwise—so that we might understand that we do not live by bread alone. This means a whole lot of things, but the first thing it means is that, if you don’t give thanks for something, then it’s bad for you.

After four weeks, the long series of reading from the bread of life section of John’s Gospel is finally finishing up. During all of this, Jesus has been saying difficult and perplexing things about himself, his ministry, and his relationship to those who follow him. He has been talking theology, fairly abstract theology. Today we finally get to the point of it, and Jesus asks the one question which properly follows any presentation of theology.

But the place to start is with the first reading—the one from Joshua. While the setting is different from the Gospel’s, the situation is really the same. Here’s what’s going on: The date is around 1100 BC. Under the leadership of Joshua, the people who followed Moses out of Egypt have conquered most of the Holy Land and are just beginning to settle down in their new territory. It’s an important time, because the first generation of Israel’s leaders is beginning to die off; and a new generation, a generation that had not been in the wilderness, is coming into its own. Joshua is old. As his final act as their leader, Joshua gathers all Israel together in a solemn ceremony. The first thing he does is recite once more all the wonderful things that God has done for them. This is theology. In fact, this account of God’s great acts is Israel’s creed, just like our creed is really the story of what God has done for us.

This is where today’s lesson begins. It begins as Joshua asks the one question that properly follows any presentation of theology: He asks "Whom will you serve?" Will you serve Yahweh, the God who has brought you this far, or will you serve someone else—maybe the old familiar gods of slavery in Egypt, maybe the gods of your new neighbors?

This was a real question, and a tough one. We need to remember that, in Joshua’s time, it was common knowledge, indeed it was common sense, that there were many gods, and that each god had a special job.

Usually that job was to be in charge of a specific place or function. There were gods for war, gods for crops, for rain, for herds, for the desert, for this nation, or that valley, or the other tribe. There were gods who looked over your family and gods who took care of your sheep. And, most of the time, a particular god was of any use only in the specific place or function that god cared about. To pray to a god of war for good crops was as silly as planting a grain of corn to grow a cow.

Now Yahweh, the God of Israel, had been very useful in the desert and during the recent wars. He had gotten them this far. But something new was happening. Yahweh had no track record at all in dealing with crops and herds; and that was Israel’s new business. Nobody knew what sort of God he would be; nobody knew what he would offer, what he would demand, or whether he would be of any real help to the people.

On the other hand, the most viable option the gods of the Amorites. The Amorites were the people who had lived for centuries in the land of Israel now controlled. These gods had a lot going for them. They had been handling crops and herds very well for a very long time. As gods went, they were not hard to understand, they were easy to please, and they didn’t ask for much. Besides all that, there were a lot of Amorites still around, and they were, in most ways, culturally and technologically superior to Israel. (And nobody wants to look unsophisticated or naive to their clever new neighbors.)

Finally, and not to taken lightly, they had great liturgy—the worship of these local gods was much more exciting, it was a whole lot more fun, than the austere, formal worship of Yahweh. That worship had better music, dances, big parties, orgies, stuff like that. If you were church shopping, these guys had all the bells and whistles. Some in Israel had already jumped on board.

So, Joshua’s question was a good one. The people had seen the power of Yahweh in the past. But now they were in a new situation, with new problems and no idea of how this god of desert battles would deal with them. They had to choose.

Notice that Joshua did not ask them to choose which god they liked, or believed in; not which god they found the most meaningful, or the most understandable, or the most attractive. They were to choose whom they would serve. They were to choose in whom they would invest their trust, their lives and their future, their own destiny and that of their children. It was a practical, and a very important question: When Joshua said "choose this day whom you will serve", he was really putting it on the line.

This is also the question Jesus asks. The people who had been following Jesus were discovering that things were changing. Jesus was not acting like the messiah they had thought he was. He had refused to be a king who would run off the Romans or provide plenty of bread. He was saying harsh, disturbing, and very confusing things about himself. He said that he came down from heaven; he said he would give his flesh and blood as food and drink; and he claimed to be greater than Moses. To top it all off, he had somehow managed to get both the political and the religious leaders mad at him. (And these two groups almost never agreed on anything.)

Clearly, something new was happening, and Jesus’ followers had no idea where he was going or what that would mean for them. When the crowd said that they were having trouble understand and believing everything he said; Jesus’ response was, in effect, "if you think this is hard, you haven’t seen anything yet." So, many of his disciples drew back, and no longer went about with him. They did not understand; and they were afraid. They also knew it cost nothing to resign. After all, there were plenty of safer and easier rabbis around to follow.

As all of this was going on, notice what Jesus did. He did not initiate a dialogue, he did not inquire about their opinions; he did not take a vote; he did not ask what they believed or whether they understood. Jesus was not interested in whether they agreed with him or whether they had any better ideas. Instead, Jesus was primarily interested in whom they would serve—in where they planned to place the other side of their laps.

Theology, real theology, always comes down to this—it always comes down to where we locate ourselves, to whether we will stay or leave; it comes down to whom we will serve. What we believe has no reality until it is expressed in action. Like Abraham, we are always being called to walk into something we really do not, and probably can not, understand fully.

Faith, at its heart, is answering Joshua’s and Jesus’ question. Faith is rejecting all of the other gods, all of the other alternatives, all of the half-measurers and all of the easier, softer ways.

Like Israel at Shechem, like the disciples at Capernaum, we have lots of choices as to whom we will serve. We have lots of interesting and exciting options. (Remember, this is about who we serve, now merely what we believe in.) Also like them, we don’t really know what it will look like to continue the journey we have begun with God. We do not know any details about where it will lead us, and we do not understand everything it means. We can neither deduce nor predict, we can only trust, and hope, and choose.

And, with God’s help, we can share with Peter one of his best moments, and we can say "Lord, you have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and we have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God". And we can join with Joshua and promise, "as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

The Lessons for today: Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-25; Psalm 16; Ephesians 5.21-33; John 6.60-69

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:
 

Sundays after Pentecost

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on December 01, 2006

By Deacon Janice Byrd

Today, as we have done for several weeks, we hear Mark discussing everyday life and since this is my forte (food and hand washing) I want to give my slant on the subject; but first—in the gospel for today the Pharisees, who represent the opposition, and scribes from Jerusalem assemble to challenge Jesus’ disciples’ behavior. Jesus turns on his opponents by taking up the remark about the traditions of the elders and challenges them by citing authorities that everyone in the debate would recognize as superior to ancestral traditions (the law).

This section of Mark develops the picture of Jesus as a teacher on a new level; the challenge by opposing teachers enables the master to demonstrate the superiority of his system.

Since Mark has just presented Jesus as a true shepherd of Israel, his conflict with his opponents on the traditions of the elders can be reviewed as a rejection of the false teaching of those whom Jesus replaces. As in earlier controversies about fasting, the initial question concerns matters that were typical of pious sects like the Pharisees. The implication is that is that if Jesus does not teach his disciples such rules of piety he cannot be a religious teacher. Mark and his readers are uninterested in the details of Jewish legal debates.

The Pharisees and scribes are familiar enemies of Jesus. Their question seeks to embarrass Jesus in front of the crowds and undermine his authority as a teacher. Mark’s stereotyped accounts of Jewish customs ensure that his readers have no sympathy with the issue being raised. Jesus response provides a three-fold reason for rejecting the fact that earlier interpretations of the Law should govern a person’s behavior.

First—the quotation from Isaiah that castigates people because they substitute human teaching for true devotion to God. The question introduces the distinction between outward piety and true devotion to God in one’s heart. What is in the heart forms the basis for the teaching that follows the exchange between Jesus and his enemies; there Jesus substitutes a new understanding of purity.

Second—refers to a custom of declaring goods (dedicating them to the temple). This gift or vow to later gifts could be retracted and this rejects all such interpretation as opposed to the word of God.

Third—nothing that a person eats or drinks can defile a person. The connection between washing and pure food belongs to the original Jewish law content since they define what is referred to as a state of purity.

Instead of a concern with external categories, Jesus insists that impurity come from within. The challenge to Jesus did not concern food that is pure or impure or non- kosher but ritual washing associated with meals. Jesus’ reply which refers to what is taken into and comes out of a person shifts the rules that govern the behavior of all Jews. Mark’s gentile audience clearly did not observe any restrictions about foods. However all the controversies in which Jesus comes to the defense of his disciples concern eating. Table fellowship between Jews and gentile Christians created considerable strife during the early community. Again this tension forces readers to the authority of the son of man over the law.

The general conclusion—all foods are clean—does not appear as a statement from Jesus. His whole rationale that what is taken in cannot defile and corrupt the heart upholds the components of God, which his opponents undermine. Rejection of kosher rules and other rituals takes away the observable outward markers that separate Jews from their gentile neighbors. External rules remind Jews that they are different from other nations. External practices should not distinguish different nations or faiths.

That was then and what about today—I have spent 50 years of my life trying to get food service people to wash their hands while preparing or serving food. CDC, the center of disease control, identifies hand washing as one of the main ways of stopping the spread of disease; JCAHO-the joint commission on accreditation of hospitals- has made proper hand washing a part of the safety goals for nursing when they inspect a hospital for accreditation. One of the main reasons for infection following surgery is the improper hand washing techniques of the surgical staff.

Now neither I nor any of the organizations that espouse proper hand washing think of it as a spiritual need; and it certainly is not done as a ritual for spiritual purification—cleansing of the outer person to protect themselves and others—not used to show inner purity. The Jewish laws for washing hands and food might very well have started as a sanitary thing in the beginning (I am speculating now); but they were touted as being necessary for the spiritual health; hand washing and foods they chose to eat and methods of food preparation were the badges of your obeying the Traditions of the Elders. Fitting in, demonstrating piousness—not making one think out of the box.

So, today, as I said, all the people are taught to wash hands and it is a good thing--- a healthy thing—Jesus was trying to say somewhat the same thing—use the cleansing of the outer person for its practicality and recognize that the inner person as being clean from the heart by thoughts and actions. I do not doubt that there are some very evil people who have very clean hands; but that does not better their actions. Jesus taught the meaning of the old laws and not the ritual—the way to live the law not a "see me" thing—the way to use the law for the good of mankind and not to separate people from each other.

Maybe we should look at our use of our religious practices and life styles and see what it means to others and us. How clean we are and how pure in our actions does not have anything to do with the number of bacteria on our hands. How we show our inner peace and love for god with our actions; not do we observe laws but live them out with real meaning. Next time you wash your hands take the time to do it properly and use the time to pray that your heart is made a little cleaner and you become a little closer to God.

The Lessons for today: Deuteronomy 4.1-9; Psalm 15; Ephesians 6.10-20; Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:
 

Sundays after Pentecost

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on December 01, 2006

We have more than 25 kids under 18 on the parish rolls. That’s a lot. Even if we don’t see that many all at once, (which is very much like the adults in the parish, come to think about it), they are still around, and, through the course of a year, you’ll probably see just about all of them; and they will almost certainly see you. That’s a big responsibility.

After all, one of the primary ways that Christian people reveal their confidence in God’s gracious rule of history is by having children. It is a tremendous act of faith and of hope. Having children is a way of looking at a world which is dangerous and out of focus and distorted—a world that revels in the superficial, the twisted, the transitory and the illusory—it’s a way of looking at that and proclaiming to one and all that in the face of all of this, there is still good reason to embrace one another and creation—and to do our part to continue the story of God and His people, and to bring that story to another generation.

Part of this is that we believe that who we are as a Christian community has something important to say to our children. We believe that our children are somehow better off if we get a shot at them here than if they spend every Sunday morning at the Mall. We believe that. That’s why we have Sunday School and youth programs. And these are good and important things to have; we take that very seriously and we do that well. We have a great staff and a first-rate program. Barbara does a great job.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to say a couple of things about our responsibilities to our children that are not directly connected to Sunday School. The first is to remind everyone that the primary responsibility for the Christian education and formation of children lies with the home—with the family (in whatever form that family may take) and with godparents, baptismal sponsors. There is simply no way to farm that responsibility out to the parish or to anywhere else. The home remains the primary influence.

Let’s face it, an hour or two in here is not as much time as most kids spend each week watching commercials, let alone TV. And the old Spanish proverb is absolutely right when it says that an ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy—any day. Remember, the vows that parents and sponsors make at Baptism—that they will see that the child is raised in the Christian life and faith, and that they will, by their prayers and witness, help the child grow into the full stature of Christ—these vows have to do with how homes and families are shaped and lived out. Before parents start saying "where was the church when...whatever happened, when Sally got pregnant or Billy got expelled or something", the first thing those of us who are parents and godparents have to ask is "where were we". We cannot pass off that responsibility to anyone else.

But that is not enough, and that does not let the rest us off the hook. All of us, all of the parish, each and every one of us, has an important role to play in who those 25 children become. As important as the family is, the larger Christian community, the parish and the diocese, are also vitally necessary. We are in this together, and truly Christian formation and growth must always include this larger community. Without that, it just isn’t there. It doesn’t just take a village, it takes a whole tribe to raise a child; and you are part of that tribe. Every adult here is a role model for every one of those 25 or more children. We must reveal to them the art of the Christian life.

After all, no one else is going to do it. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, there are two places where our children, all of our children, have the ghost of a chance to learn by word and example the good news of God in Christ. One is at home, the other is here. That’s it. We can count on no place else, and we can rely on nobody else. We used to assume that our children would pick up a decent sense of who to be and how to behave from the world around them, from the general social and moral atmosphere. If that were ever true, it is no longer true. We are it; all of us together. That’s scary.

Now, there is a lot to say about how we, as a parish, can live out this reality; about what we can do. I want to get at just a piece of that with a story I think I have told before. It’s an old story about Mahatma Gandhi. One day a woman came to Gandhi and said, "My child is eating too much sugar, way too much. It is not good for her. She admires you and I want you to tell her not to do this."

Gandhi closed his eyes, and a moment later he nodded, and said, "Yes, fine. Come back here in three weeks and bring your child." So, three weeks later, the woman brings the child. Gandhi says to the child, "Don’t eat any more sugar, it’s not good for you". The child, all bug-eyed and awed from being the presence of the great man, says, "Yes, enlightened one", and means it. So everybody gets up to leave. But the mother turns back, and asks, "Mahatma, why did you ask me to return, you could have done this three weeks ago." And Gandhi replied, "No, I couldn’t. Three weeks ago I was still eating sugar." That’s an important story

There is nothing we can say or do that will matter, that will help our children and the children of our parish, unless we it is based on integrity. We cannot give what we do not have.

This is absolutely central. One of the truly stunning about being a parent, or about being an adult who, like each of you, influences children, is realizing that our children will very quickly come to know what is really important to us, what is really of value to us; regardless of what we say. Don’t worry that the kids never listen to you. Worry because they are always watching you. I know St. Mary’s has much to give in this regard, I have seen it as our son grew up among you—and I know the difference it makes.

But it never hurts to be reminded that we can expect our children (and the children of St. Mary’s) to take their faith no more seriously than we take ours. We can expect our children (and the children of St. Mary’s) to be no more concerned about integrity, morality, and virtue than they clearly see that we are. We can expect our children (and the children of St. Mary’s) to care no more about the parish than we do; to talk about what they believe no more than we do, to treat one another any more decently or kindly than we treat one another.

One straightforward and simple consequence of all of this is that the primary and most important way to help our children’s faith to grow and mature is to pay careful attention to the growth and maturity of our own faith. If we do not do that, we really have no right to expect it. Without that, anything else we do will be seriously weakened. This is true of all that we value, and it is especially true of such values as our relationship to God and to the Church, the content of our morality, and our image of what it looks like to love and to be loved. That’s the second thing.

So, the first day of Sunday School carries some important reminders. It reminds of some of God’s most precious gifts to us, the ones we see running around all over the place, and it reminds us that all of us (parents, grandparents, and godparents especially, but all of us) are important, all of us are a part of what it means for St. Mary’s to offer its children the Christian faith and life. And it reminds us that the way and the place start, as usual, is with ourselves.

What I want to say this has to do with all of the lessons; and we need to listen carefully. Look at Isaiah: What the prophet seems to be saying is that he has listened for God, God has spoken to him, and he has taken to heart what God is saying. And it turns out that what this means is that the prophet is going to get beat up on. He is going to be abused and attacked and God is going to let it happen and that’s all right. This is what Isaiah says he has learned from the Lord.

James, on the other hand, is trying to teach the church; which means us. James is insisting that to show any partiality or preferences for the people we like the most, or want to have around the most, or find most attractive, or most helpful, or most likely to strengthen the community—to pay special attention to any of these, is to abandon the Lord. The stuff about rich and poor is not only about that it is about much, much more. It’s really about what and whom we value. It is about our sense of decency and importance and propriety. It is about what we believe makes a good and a valuable person. James says that if we pay special attention to what the world says about that, then we are convicted by the law as transgressors. (St. Benedict made the same point a few centuries later when he said that a condition of Christian community is that it includes at least one person you wish wasn’t there.)

Jesus, meanwhile, is beating his head against a brick wall. He is trying to teach something to Peter, who stands for the Church, which also means us. Peter just doesn’t get it. Now, Peter has just made the biggest score of his life as a disciple. Jesus asked the disciples who they thought he was, and Peter got it right! Peter became the first human being to confess Jesus as the Christ. He hit the jackpot.

After that, Peter thought all of the hard stuff was over. He knew what it meant for Jesus to be the messiah. Everybody knew what the messiah was going to do. The messiah was going to run off the bad guys, restore the monarchy of King David, and begin a time of power, peace, and prosperity for Israel. Everybody knew that. So when Jesus started saying things like sounded very much like what Isaiah had said, Peter quickly and not so gently took Jesus off to the side for an attitude adjustment. "No," Peter said, "that’s not how it works, the messiah wins, the messiah triumphs, the messiah rules. The messiah doesn’t suffer." And, much to Peter’s surprise, Jesus was not in the least grateful for this little instructional lecture on how to be a messiah. Instead, Jesus turns on Peter and really mops the floor with him.

Jesus is trying to teach Peter and the others, including us, that being the messiah, and being the messiah’s followers, does not mean what everybody thinks, or what everybody knows it means. Instead, being the messiah, and being the messiah’s followers, mean just exactly and precisely whatever the messiah says it means. Nothing more, nothing less. On that day, it meant suffering and death.

That’s some of the teaching and learning that are going on in these lessons. And there is at least one thing that all of this has in common. If you listen carefully, and if you try hard to take it all seriously, then it really doesn’t make very much sense. Think about it.

Does it seem reasonable that the consequences of hearing what God says and doing it should be the problems that Isaiah had? And the stuff that James says about showing partiality is not, well, sensible, given the realities of both human nature and institutional survival. And the church has for centuries managed to reinterpret, spiritualize, misconstrue, and, (if all else fails), simply ignore, the business about denying one’s self, and losing one’s life in order to find it. Instead, we have come up with all sort of ways of saying that what it means for God to love us, and what it means for us to be chosen by God, is that only and exactly those things we want to happen to us will happen to us. That’s even become a growth industry in popular theology these days. Heresy is always attractive.

After all, we know the answer to Jesus question about what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life. The answer is that it will profit them the whole world. And that’s a lot. Most of us are willing to settle for a whole lot less.

There is something strange, and uncomfortable, and a little ridiculous at the heart to all of what we are taught today. To align ourselves with the man Jesus, as with the God of Isaiah, is to take a different path, and to live a different way.

Yet I am convinced that it is only by taking seriously and embracing what are sometimes called the hard saying of Jesus, it is only by opening our eyes and our hearts to words that demand of us service, sacrifice, witness and absolute openness to whatever new thing God will have us do and have us be, it is only by this that the Church will have something important and interesting to say to a culture that is frantically dying in its excesses. Only then.

Further, I am convinced that it is only as we try to make our own the Lord’s vision of what human life is created to be that we will discover both the full richness and depth that are possible within our own lives, and the full power of God’s spirit as we are sent into mission. After all, if common sense, hard work and business as usual were all it took for life to be what it is supposed to be, then Jesus would have been unnecessary. And foolish.

What we need to be taught, what we need to learn, is how to see the world as God sees it: What we need to be taught, what we need to learn, is how to see the world in such a way that these words of Jesus both make sense, and draw from us commitment and action. What we need are new eyes, the eyes of Christ. And what we need to learn is how to care, and how to love, and how to think as God cares, and loves, and thinks. What we need is a new heart, the heart of Christ. And what we need to learn is how to know what matters, what really matters, and what does not. What we need is a new mind, the mind of Christ.

We cannot learn this on our own, and no preacher or teacher can give us what we need. But God can do that, and God yearns to do this, and God delights in the very idea of offering to us His eyes, His heart, and His mind. God can do that, and God can do that here. We need to ask, and to seek, and (unlike Peter) to be willing to learn.

The lessons today are about teaching and learning. They are about what we really need, and they can lead us to surprising places, and to new adventures.

But, as tempting as that is, that is not what these lessons are about. At their deepest level, these lessons are not directly about children, ours or anyone else’s. They are about who we are called to be. They are about the sort of life we are called to live, and in the living of it, reveal it to a world that has most everything backwards.

The place to begin is to remember that in Jesus we see who God created us to be. Jesus is our image—our icon—of full and complete humanity. In Jesus, God has revealed to us, perfectly, what it means to be a human being.

Keep that in mind as you recall the scene from the Gospel. Jesus is telling his disciples what it means for him to be faithful to the Father. He talks of betrayal, suffering, rejection and death. The disciples not only fail to understand him, they immediately do something incredibly stupid to show how little they grasp what Jesus is saying.

They start trying to determine which of them is the greatest—the best, the most successful, at being a disciple. That’s when Jesus grabs a handy child and uses the poor kid as a sermon illustration. The real point, Jesus says, is to receive a child. The real issue is that greatness is not the real issue.

To seek success or greatness at being a disciple is utterly to miss the point. This is not because success is so difficult to obtain that the disciples, and we, aren’t good enough to pull it off. This is not because the disciples were trying to do the wrong things in order to be successful. Instead, the search for greatness itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire business of being a disciple.

The disciples’ problem was not that they were wrong about which of them was the greatest, and why. Their problem was in thinking it made sense to seek greatness in any way that the disciples could imagine. Their problem was in thinking that the world’s standards and categories belonged within the community that Jesus was creating.

Once more, Jesus is insisting that following him—seeing in him the perfect image of who we can be—this involves walking away from the world’s way of understanding what has value, what counts and what is important. It involves discovering and following a new way. It is to live a new model, a new ideal for who we want to be.

The reading from the Book of Wisdom makes this point in a theatrical way. There (in a sort of melodrama or morality play) the ungodly—the worldly, the bad guys—conspire to do in the righteous—the good guys. The ungodly decide that a good dose of the ‘real’ world will show those pious frauds what really matters. For the world knows what the righteous deny—they know that "what is weak proves itself to be worthless". What a wonderful summary of the whole vision of reality that surrounds us—from politics to economics to social standing—"what is weak proves itself to be useless." That’s what the bad guys say.

Jesus could have had these verses from Wisdom in mind when he took a child and said that to receive such as this is to receive Jesus and the Father who sent him. But be careful, because it’s easy to miss what is going on here.

Jesus uses a child as an example, not because children were considered valuable, or cute, or important; and not because children are innocent, or naive, or simple. Jesus uses a child as an example because, at that time, children were generally not considered to be any of those things. They were considered useless; they were considered without value. To receive a child, to offer a child hospitality and protection, would bring no influence, no prestige and no advantage to the host.

No status could be achieved, no benefit gained, by doing this. Your neighbors would think you were a fool, and whatever it cost you would be wasted.

Jesus contrasts this with the search for greatness. To receive the Lord, to serve Him, is not always to do things that are universally considered to be nice, kind, compassionate, holy and commendable. Very often, it is to be a fool. It is to see things strangely; it is to find value in unexpected and puzzling places. It is to seek service over greatness, faithfulness over success, reaching out over holding on, trust over security.

To follow the Lord—to accept the vision of human life he offers as our own—is a very difficult, and a very distinctive thing to do. It is such a contrast to business as usual that the Epistle of James insists that friendship with the world is enmity with God.

James is probably right, as the writer of Wisdom is probably right. To live this way, the way of Jesus, is to clash with our culture, and with our peers. It is to live in such a way that victory, status, success and comparisons do not matter. It is to learn to see the greatest value and importance in that which is weak, and powerless, and without prestige.

It is to live in such a way as the world around us knows we are different because it can see that we are different. It is to receive with joy and love those who can offer nothing in return.

Here is where I can sneak in a word or two about our children. It is this different sort of life that we are to live, and show to our children. That is how we teach them the Christian life, by revealing it in our living long before we use words to tell about it. It’s a big order.

Lest we despair, it is also important to remember that the example of human life we see in Jesus is both a gift and a challenge. It is not a test and it is not some kind of requirement for being in God’s good graces. God does not demand that we live as the Lord lives so that God will love us. Rather, because God loves us, he has shown us, in this man Jesus, how we can live in such a way as we fulfill our nature as human beings.

What is greatness? For us it has to do with what the world around us sees as without value and without significance. It has to do with living past our selves, and outside of ourselves. Our Lord offers us this vision of life, and calls us to make it our own.

If we do that, we really will have something to show our children, and something to teach them.

First of all, we get it wrong by just flinching at the imagery and letting it go at that. Chopping off hands and gouging out eyes—yech. Surely Jesus can’t mean that. Well, yes and no. Certainly, Jesus wasn’t talking about physically chopping one’s self into bits. (This is one of those verses that shows how a simplistic literalism simply cannot do.) But he does mean something very much like that. Jesus is saying that if there is a part of you that is dragging you away from who you are supposed to be—if there is something that you do, or something that you have, that is clearly an occasion of sin and an impediment to the life you are called to live—then stop it. Cut it off. Don’t whine about it, don’t blame someone else for it, don’t analyze it or justify it or baptize it or minimize it or compare it to your neighbor’s. Just stop it. Easier said than done, I know. Really, I know; but that’s the word.

The image about hacking off things is a good one. Anyone who has been (or felt like they were) the only person in the room without something really good to drink in their hand; or the only one in a group who refuses to pick up on a racist joke or a really good line of gossip, or who has had to walk away from the chance of a lifetime because it was the wrong chance, or the wrong time, or the wrong life—anyone who has done these or any of their many variations, knows just exactly what Jesus means when he talks about chopping off your own hand to save your life, or to save your soul. Because that’s what it feels like.

The demand of the Gospel is that we set for ourselves the highest possible standards, and that we seek the guidance and the help of God in forming ourselves fully into the image of our Lord. This is never easy. Even when it’s simple and clear, it’s never easy. It is a spiritual struggle that will always seem to pinch hardest where we are the weakest and the most likely to ignore the matter, or to try will power, or to give the hand a little slap, instead of the chopping Jesus would have us do—and by doing that we miss the powerful, humbling, grace that the Lord offers to make the cutting possible.

So, that’s one way we get this business of chopping off hands and gouging out eyes wrong—by not taking it seriously, by not realizing that Jesus is, as he often does, using exaggerated language to make a very real and immediate demand on us.

The other way we get it wrong has to do with both the Old Testament lesson and the business in Mark with the foreign exorcist. The disciples had stumbled upon someone who had apparently heard of Jesus, and who seemed to think well of Jesus, but who was not one of the disciples. He was different, and he was unsupervised, and he was, well, he was one of them. Whoever them happened to be that week. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the disciples also didn’t like this guy’s style, either—he probably used different words or gestures—you know, he didn’t do the service right.)

So the disciples told him to quit; they tried to cut him off. Which is exactly what Joshua and the other folks in the reading from Numbers tried to do with Eldad and Medad. Eldad and Medad were also behaving in an unauthorized way, they were also acting outside of regulations. So the response of the good people who were keeping the rules and doing things the way they were supposed to be done was to cut them off. "My lord Moses stop them!" Joshua says, predicting almost to the word the disciples’ reaction to the non-conformist in Capernaum some 1,200 years later.

Now, on one level, these readings speak to the religious community of their day, to Israel and to the early Christian Church, about the proper response to groups that were different from them. They say that God’s work, and God’s people, and God’s embrace, are all bigger than the circles we draw. The spirit is likely to be doing all sorts of surprising and unusual things—in the culture, outside of the institution, outside of what is expected and authorized. We need to be careful about those circles we draw, about who we declare in and out, and who we try to cut off. And our history certainly underlines the wisdom of our Lord’s words.

But the point here is also personal, and it goes a lot deeper than weird preachers. After all, how much are we like the disciples and Joshua. How often do we decide that the idea of radical and uncompromising adjustment to meet the highest possible standards is a good idea—for them, for someone else, for the other guy? How much time and energy do we devote to figuring out what the other needs to change—whether the other is a person close to us, a group we find troubling, the people we work with, pesky neighbors, whatever? How much of our effort goes to figuring out what hand, eye or foot they need to chop off, and then to being angry and resentful when they don’t instantly oblige us and get themselves just the way we want them to be? If only they could change; if only they would cut this out or chop that off, or whatever.

Yet there is a constant and fascinating pattern in the Gospels. Virtually every time people come to Jesus complaining about how bad they are, whichever they folks are complaining about, Jesus does the same thing; he turns it around.

In one way or another Jesus lets them off the hook, and makes strong and hard demands of you, of whomever it was who started off the complaining.

So today he says, don’t go around cutting off this preacher you have never heard of before. Leave him alone, be easy on the other guy, even if he’s a bit whacky. But as for you..."If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off..." and so on. Jesus insists that the place to focus our efforts at improving and reforming people is with ourselves, not with them. Of course we want it the other way around. We want to be gentle, patient and understanding with those few (and doubtless minor) vices we might have, but we also want to dig right in and fix them. That’s the second way we get the business of cutting off hands and gouging out eyes wrong. We take our axe and go after the wrong people.

Maybe this is the best place to start with these hard saying of the Lord. These words about chopping and tearing are important, we need to pay attention to them; but they are about us, not about them. Jesus does ask much of us, and he expects much of us.

But that’s not whole story, because every time he asks us to do something, especially something difficult and frightening, he also promises us his grace and his presence as we move through that call. Whatever roads we are given are all the same road, the road to Him, the road home.