It's Time to Build our Nest

       When I was in the sixth grade, I got a little autograph book for my birthday. Back in the early ‘70’s, these books were not necessarily intended for celebrity autographs, but you would get your classmates and teachers and family to write something cute and funny in there—the kind of things that people write these days in school yearbooks. Well, when I gave the book to my parents to sign, my father jotted down something sweet and comforting like, “I will always be proud of you. Love, Daddy.” But my mother, O my mother …. She pulled out a little poem from her well-worn devotional notebook, full of pasted prayers and inspirational quotes, and she wrote: “’To every man there openeth, a way and a ways and a way. The high soul treads the high way and the low soul gropes the low, and in between on the misty flats, the rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth, a way, and a ways, and a way. And every man decideth the way his soul shall go,’ Love, Mama.”

         I remember rolling my eyes and grinding my teeth in my best pre-adolescent girl way when I read it, thinking, “O come on, Mother, it’s just an autograph book—Lighten up on me, please!” And yet, that little poem in that silly little autograph book had a profound effect on my life. Against my will, it somehow stuck fast in my memory. After 40 years, I didn’t even have to look it up today to write it in my sermon. It made me painfully aware of the importance of my choices. When I would stand at a fork in the road, I would picture those words in my mother’s tilting and familiar handwriting, and I would remember what I had been taught at church and at home, and I would know that, even though I had a choice, the high road was the way to go. Sure, I was not always able to take that road in my life, but I knew which one it was and that I belonged on it.

          In John’s Gospel, the disciples, too, are presented with a life-changing choice. Do they remain good, faithful Jews, following the Law, remaining true to their understanding of God, or do they continue to follow the difficult, different, and dangerous Word that Jesus presents to them—a Word that is growing more confusing and more threatening to their old lives every day. It is a difficult choice that they must make, and according to our Gospel lesson, “many of [Jesus’] disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” Peter, however, standing at the fork in the road, finds that he has no choice but to throw up his hands like I did in front of my mother’s poem: “Lord, to whom can we go?” he complains. “You have the words of Everlasting Life.” Realizing that he has seen the Holy One in the heretical rabbi from Nazareth, Peter knows that he must follow him.

Deep down, most of us here today have seen the Holy One in Jesus Christ. We have seen at least glimpses of the Truth, or we probably wouldn’t be in church today. Going to church is no longer the “socially acceptable” thing to do. In the 21^st century, we no longer need to have our names in the roll books of a church for business reasons or to be accepted by society or our families. So unless your parents have dragged you here today out of your nice, warm beds to sing in the youth choir, you have probably come of your own free will, somehow hungry for Life or Truth or God. You have perhaps tasted Life in the mystery of the Eucharist, or you have heard whispers of Truth in the strange Words of Scripture, or you have met Jesus in the loving deeds of another Christian. We are not yet the disciples who have turned away. We, like Peter, are here because the Truth has hold of us by the scruff of our necks. Once we have opened ourselves to just a sliver of the Truth, it will continue to gnaw away at even the easiest and most attractive lies within us.

 The temptation for us today, though, given the difficulty of the journey, is to want to hold out at the entrance to the path of discipleship for as long as we can, without really entering it. Peter acknowledges here in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel that he is compelled to follow Jesus, but it is not until much later, after he has denied Jesus 3 times to save his own skin, that he becomes a true leader in the early Church … a leader who is eventually martyred for following Jesus’ dangerous, difficult Words. It takes him awhile finally to enter the path that he reluctantly chooses in today’s Gospel. Like Peter, it is hard for us to take the plunge, as well. Wouldn’t it be appealing to imagine the Christian life to be like a bird soaring through the skies? Swooping through the heavens, close to God, as free as a bird, going where I please, looking from afar at the troubles and traps of the world down below? Zipping into a community of faith and back out again, unattached, grabbing a bit of God, shaking Jesus’ hand, sipping a bit of Truth as reinforcement for my continued solo flight—Doesn’t that sound wonderful? 

The trouble is that we can only fly around for so long. We can try to put off the moment of decision, but choose we must, for we cannot spend our lives in flight. Even birds have to land, and where they chose to make their nest is where they and their young will live and die.  Our Psalmist cries, “The sparrow has found her a house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts … Happy are they who dwell in your house… whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.” Jesus says over and over in John’s Gospel that we are to abide him, and that he abides in us. Abiding is not like flitting through the heavens. Abiding is like building a nest, settling down for the long haul, making a place into our home. To choose Christ is to make our nests in him, to curl up and live—and die—in him.

At Stewardship time, when the Vestry and Stewardship Team and I start talking about giving a sizable percentage of your income back to God, I know that it sounds an awful lot like a tricky way of saying that St. Thomas needs a new air-conditioner. I know that when I call you and ask you to be an acolyte or to be on the Vestry, that it sounds an awful lot like I am desperate to get some job done in the parish. Yes, we do need money to run St. Thomas, and we do have lots of jobs that need doing, but truly—and I am being upfront with you, I promise—that is not why you should give your valuable time, treasure, and talent to any parish. You give these things to God, because the way to find life in Christ, is to build your nest in him. It is to drag all of the scraps and pieces of your world into Christ and to form them, painstakingly, into your spiritual home. To enter the path that you have chosen is to dwell in God in a concrete way—to make the rhythms of your life, God’s rhythms: to rebel against our fast-paced world and to take real Sabbath rest; to worship regularly enough so that you live consciously into the circle of the Christian year, from Advent to Incarnation, to Lent, to Easter, to Pentecost; to pray throughout the day so that your prayer structures your life.[1] To enter the path that you have chosen is to dwell in Christian community: to serve together with others, to serve together with God, to offer yourselves to Christ and to one another.

          Several years ago, I found that some birds had done an awfully speedy and careless job of building a nest in the running shoes that were sitting on a shelf in my garage. I obviously didn't wear the shoes very often, but when I found a compact little nest balancing in the empty shoe, with stray grass and straw scattered messily around it for good measure, I decided that I didn’t like sharing my shoes. Since the nest was completely empty, I deduced that the birds agreed with me, and I carefully moved the nest from my shoe and tossed it outside. Much to my dismay, a few days later I found several little blue eggs sitting forlornly on the shelf next to the spot where the nest used to be. The birds, apparently confused because their nest was no longer there, didn’t know where else to lay their eggs. The eggs never hatched.

          We are blessed. We know where we can lay our eggs so that they will come alive. We know the difference between running shoes and the tallest cedar branches, between the low road and the high road, between life in the world and life in God, between the flower that fades and the God that abides forever. It would be sad for us to fly around afraid or undecided until we drop with exhaustion onto a shelf in the garage. It is time for us to start building our nests where our hearts are already set.

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[1] You can tell that I just read Dorothy Bass’ book, Receiving the Day, which will be the subject of our fall parish retreat in October ….

Vampires, Cannibals, or Cardboard?

At one of my first children’s chapel services at St. Mark’s, after I had lifted and blessed the paten full of thin communion wafers, a very alert and confident four-year-old interrupted me and proclaimed knowingly to her peers, “That’s not bread—it’s cardboard!” After it “snapped” in my hands at the fraction, she raised an eyebrow and murmured with satisfaction, “See? Cardboard!” When I told the rector about the embarrassing incident, he spoke from experience: “Sure--the difficult part is not to convince imaginative children that bread can become Jesus’ body; the difficult part is to convince them that those little wafers are bread!”

If our clean, crisp wafers don’t resemble bread, they resemble even less the food that Jesus describes in John’s Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you feed on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” he challenges us in today’s lesson. Being an orderly person, I love the orderly choreography of the Eucharist. I like that it follows a clear pattern, and that there is a place for everything, and everything has its place. I like the gleaming silver, the beautiful, flowing gestures, the flickering candle flames, the deep purple of the wine, and the neat way that the wafer snaps in two. But despite the words that I say about body and blood, it is easy for us to forget that flesh and blood and death have anything to do with our beautiful ritual meal. However, if I had read John’s version of the Words of Institution that day in children’s chapel, I doubt that my four-year-old friends would have been thinking about cardboard. I imagine that I would have heard a resounding chorus of “Ewww, gross!” from my honest young parishioners, instead.

With his talk of eating flesh and drinking blood, Jesus is purposefully being disgusting. For devout Jews like Jesus and his disciples, any kind of blood was a most sacred thing. According to the clear proscriptions of the Law, blood is not to be consumed, and meat should not even contain animal blood when it is eaten. Human flesh being devoured is a metaphor for hostile attack in the Old Testament, and the devil himself is called an “eater of flesh.”[1] Yet, here we have Jesus talking about us eating human flesh and drinking human blood! With this vocabulary, it is no wonder that early Christians were accused of cannibalism by outsiders. Such language even sounds shocking to our modern ears. After all, even the handsome vampire in the popular Twilight series only drinks animal blood, for goodness’ sake! There is more to worry about, in taking communion, than drinking your neighbors’ backwash in the chalice.

To make the phrase even more jarring, the Greek verb translated in our text by “eat” is a word often used in other texts to describe the slurping, gnawing way that animals eat. English is actually the only language I know that doesn’t commonly make a distinction between human and animal eating. I learned my lesson about the difference one day as a new French-speaker in France, when I sweetly asked my husband’s colleagues at a dinner party if they would now like to “chomp on” on some dessert, not realizing that the slang word for “animal” eating that I had heard him use at home was not acceptable for educated humans in polite company. In our text, Jesus doesn’t mind at all using the Greek word for “chomping” in polite company--and on purpose: “Those who gnaw on my flesh … Those who devour my flesh will abide in me and I in them,” he says. Instead of picturing the nice clean loaf of bread and cup of wine offered at the Last Supper, instead of picturing the silver vessels and freshly-starched fair linens of our own churches, it seems as if we are supposed to picture ourselves at the Eucharist slurping up the blood from a raw arm bone, attacking muscle and fat in the voracious way that my dog Buck dives into leftovers from the grill.

Why must Jesus get so earthy and graphic and even disgusting in his language here? Why does he want to shock and upset us with these images? First of all, we must remember that Jesus always changes the way that we think by shocking us with his strange ways of acting and talking.  He is constantly breaking accepted conventions and purity laws: eating with tax collectors, refusing to make his disciples wash their hands before eating, healing on the Sabbath, hanging out with prostitutes. He gives us outrageous commands that seem impossible to follow, like loving our enemies and plucking out a lustful eye. And of course his strange parables are all meant to shock us and shake us to our foundations, so that we can be free of our boxed-in thoughts and rigid ways. Jesus does not teach by rules but by exception to the rule. Jesus’ outlandish language shatters all of our rules and activates our powerfully transforming imaginations, rather than our weak and rule-bound wills. It is in opening our eyes to see the world differently that he transforms us from the inside out.

In telling us to devour his flesh and to drink his blood, Jesus is using the language of sacrifice, turning it upside down and inside out in his typically shocking way. Jesus and his disciples were used to the sacrifices of animal flesh and blood in the Temple in Jerusalem. They knew how Moses had built an altar and made burnt-offerings, splashing and splattering blood on the altar and on all the people present, before receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, fixing God’s Law in the “blood of the Covenant” and thereby uniting the community. (Exodus 24) Ancient sacrifices were a way of drawing close to God by giving God the precious blood of life, but in so doing, they served to purify, to set apart, the community or the individual making the sacrifice.

According to Richard Beck, Jesus confounds our quest for purity by mixing it with our natural disgust for devouring flesh and drinking blood.[2] Instead of purifying ourselves and drawing close to God through the sacrificing of animal flesh and blood, Jesus “grosses us out” by telling us to find life in consuming his own flesh and blood. After eating his flesh and drinking his blood, the breaking-down of other culturally-constructed barriers can follow. Why not open ourselves up to people who normally disgust us? Why not let sinners and rule-breakers, the lost and the impure, into our fellowship? Amy Frykholm tells the story of a man who barges into her church service during the Eucharist, drunk and bleeding heavily from his hand. Leaving bloody handprints on his way up to the altar, he blurts out at the altar rail, “I have hepatitis C.”[3] Would you let him drink with you the cup of blood, the Cup of Life? Is Jesus’ blood really any safer than his?

Moreover, Jesus’ stomach-turning words will not let us forget that God became flesh--bloody, mortal flesh--flesh that allows itself to be eaten up, a “piece of meat” to be mishandled and consumed. Not only do Jesus’ strange words mess with our idea of purity, they mess with our idea of power and control, as well. Rowan Williams points out that, in presenting himself as flesh that is to be eaten, Jesus makes the new creation “an act of utter withdrawal.”[4] By renouncing power and control, Jesus breaks the world’s system of power and control, binding the betrayers and the betrayed into a community held together by God’s promises. Bread and water, flesh and blood, body and soul, life and death—all abide in Christ, as Christ abides in God. Jesus shows us that real power is in the divine abiding, an abiding that begins in Jesus’ renunciation, giving himself over to the power of death.

These days, wherever we turn, we hear, “If I am not on top, then I will be trampled.” We hear, “Make way for me and mine!” We hear, “I am afraid, give me security!” We hear, “I am afraid, let me be in control!” We hear, “I am afraid, others are out to get me!” We hear, “I am afraid, give me rules and certainties.” Jesus says, “Rules and certainties are only cardboard. What you think is power, is really nothing. What you think is secure, is empty. The ones whom you think are out to get you are really your brothers and sisters. What you think is valuable, is but dust. What you think is pure, winds up in the sewer. If you are afraid, let go. Open your hands for the food of vulnerability. Share the cup that overflows with the deep red promises of God. Abide in the bloody flesh that is the life of the world.

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[1] Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (The Anchor Bible 2006), 284.

[2] Amy Frykholm, review of Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality by Richard Beck, Christian Century, June 27, 2012.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rowan Williams, “Sacraments of the New Society,” in On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 216.

Funeral Homily for Daryl Busey

        If Daryl had been standing near the self-important disciples who were turning away the little children as they came curiously sidling up to Jesus, he would have been the one motioning to the children with a nod and a wink to stand behind him until he could get Jesus’ attention and smuggle them over to him. I can picture Daryl now in a comfortable shirt and with a giant mug of sweet tea, sitting on a stump and listening intently to Jesus’ words while quietly engaging the children around him, the children that nobody else was paying any attention to. It’s not just that Daryl loved children (though he did); it’s not just that Daryl didn’t care what others would think (though he didn’t); Daryl had learned the truth of God’s love for all people, including the marginalized, including those who “don’t count” in our society. He understood that God’s Kingdom belongs to them, for they are the only ones who are free enough to enter it.

When Daryl agreed to submit his name for the Vestry, our governing board at St. Thomas, I asked him to write up a short biography for the parish newsletter—something that would tell people who he is and why he wanted to serve on the Vestry. When I arrived at his house to meet with him, he handed me a long, hand-written statement on a yellow legal pad. His handwriting was so bad that I had to ask him to read it aloud. My delight that someone had taken my request seriously enough to write such a long piece, soon turned to squirming as I listened to what turned out to be a brilliant parody of all such autobiographical statements. With dry wit and biting prose, Daryl turned each of his many accomplishments upside down, proudly claimed any failures, praised only his beloved wife, and made joke after joke at his own expense. He knew that we couldn’t publish his statement in the newsletter, but he had thoroughly enjoyed himself both writing the piece and watching the shocked look on my face while he read it. And with this bio that could have been written by Flannery O’Connor herself, Daryl had made a point that I will never forget: that pretense has no place in the church and that God loves us and calls us to serve as the imperfect human beings that we all are. I wish that I had kept it to share with you today.

 Daryl was one of those rare people who had learned what matters in this world (and what does not matter.) Like St. Paul, he understood that our own knowledge, our own prophecy, our own accomplishments, our own rules of decorum, are really only childish games played in the dark. It is only Love, God’s senseless, dangerously powerful, all-encompassing, ever-giving and eternal Love, that will bring us true Life.

Daryl still lives in that Love now, in that Love that never ends, and just as he was willing to suffer the risk and the pain that accompany a life filled with that Love on earth, I believe that he is now enjoying the beauty of that love in its fullness in God. Having entered God’s kingdom with the freedom and vulnerability of a child, having been taken in Jesus’ arms and blessed, Daryl now continues to grow in love and joy and peace, whatever that may look like on the other side of the mirror. I hope that Daryl’s spirit will remain with us here at St. Thomas, too, and that we will always be able to hear his chuckle when we are taking ourselves too seriously, that we will feel that poke in our ribs when we start feeling sorry for ourselves, and that we will hear his Southern Baptist preacher-style, Scripture-soaked voice (a voice of true authority that all of his humility and self-deprecating humor could not hide) urging us to hurry up and love, to get out there among God’s people and love.

Watching the Olympics with St. Paul

        While most of you were watching the London Olympic Games this week out of pleasure or patriotism, my determined eye was on the news of the Olympics in search of a sermon illustration. After all, with our lesson from Ephesians continuing to use the metaphor this week of the Christian community as Christ’s Body, I couldn’t help but think that the Olympics would be the place to look for illustrations of bodily perfection! So I watched and read about the swimmers and the gymnasts and the rowers and even the beach volleyball players as they competed in individual and team events, and I was indeed rewarded with two insights for us today at St. Thomas.

          My first insight came while watching the supple swimmers do their amazingly quick turns at the end of the pool. As the contestants in the backstroke race reached the pool wall, they would flip themselves around like a beach ball in a gust of wind and then shimmy forward underwater like dolphins until they were once again on their backs and racing forward. As I watched their bodies move through the water as if they were made of rubber rather than bone, I thought about the work of the tendons and ligaments that hold muscle to bone in their arms and legs. Bones move together because ligaments provide a framework between one bone and another, and tendons connect bones with the muscles, pulling on the joints so that they can bend and rotate. Watching the Olympic swimmers, I could picture the sinews of tendon and ligament within their bodies stretching and twisting like rubber bands, making possible those powerful kicks, that rapid-fire flip, and those fish-like shimmies. Watching those swimmers, I suddenly understood what the apostle Paul was getting at in that typically dense Pauline run-on sentence at the end of today’s Epistle: “But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way  … into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.”

We are used to imagining our participation in Christ’s Body in terms of individual body parts: Like legs or arms or eyes, we understand that we each fulfill specific functions in the community. The function of the teachers is to teach, just like the function of the legs is to kick. The function of the pastors is to shepherd, just as the function of the arms is to hold things. The function of the evangelists is to bring Good News, just as the function of the eyes is to tell us what is around us. Such an image of the body, however, while emphasizing the variety of roles that we play in community, does not shed any light on the ways in which we touch one another as we live and move together. This understanding of the body metaphor is missing the tendons and the ligaments that surround the bones; it is missing the supple parts that rub up against one another—the parts where friction occurs, yet the parts that hold the body together and allow it to move. If we are to move forward in love, if we are to grow and mature without deformation, if we are to twist and turn successfully in the currents, then we need to realize that we are more than just disjointed body parts, each doing its own thing. We need the tendons and ligaments that Paul commends to the Ephesians: humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and peace.

In a small parish like St. Thomas, we know each other well, and we are used to our roles in the Body. We think that we know what kind of movement it takes to pull forward in the water, and we think that we know the people around us with whom we coordinate those movements. We also each have multiple roles in this Body. Not only are many of us a leg, but we might serve as a finger and a nose, as well! It is hard to be joined by a tendon to a neck muscle when you are also joined by some ligament to the kneecap. What I have noticed, though, and notice even more lately, is that we lack the agile movements of the Olympic swimmers because we forget that the separate parts of our common Body need fasteners.

Recently, it seems as if I often hear one group in the parish complaining bitterly (to me or to someone else) about another group or one individual complaining about another--either that they aren’t pulling their weight or that they aren’t doing things the way they have always been done or that they aren’t communicating thoughtfully (very often it is a matter of communication, or a lack thereof). I see each section of us so busy “doing our thing,” so entrenched in our role, that we don’t think who is positioned next to us or how we might need to work with them: bearing with them when they are annoying, persisting together in what is right, responding gently even under duress, walking in humility with one another.  We are each so focused on the jobs that have been given to us in this small Body of Christ, so focused on finally getting them done so that we can go home and do something else, that we are like a bag of separate bones trying to swim. And it is preventing us from moving forward.

I have also been feeling that it is sometimes assumed—either on your parts or on mine--that it is only the rector’s job to serve as the sinews between parts of the body. I feel as if I need to be the constant cushion between what are often quite sharp and pointy bones! I feel as if I am solely responsible for communication and coordination between the body parts, solely responsible for smoothing ruffled feathers and guarding the unity of the Spirit. That is not what Paul is saying, however, in our lesson from Ephesians. Paul makes it clear that God gives us each the grace, along with the gift, to build this body up in love. It is Christ, not the rector, who enters into our hearts to bind us to one another in love and peace. And that brings me to my second Olympic insight—one from the rowing competition.   

      The New York Times did an interview with the coxswain of our American gold-medal women’s rowing team, Mary Whipple.[1] The article describes Mary as “a sapling among the redwoods,” a short, petite woman with a soft-spoken voice and quiet demeanor. Coxswain means “boat servant,” and while she doesn’t row and doesn’t need the strong muscles of her teammates, it is her challenging job to face forward and see what is coming, to execute race strategy, and to keep the rowers motivated. “That’s it,” I thought as I read about Mary. I could identify with Mary Whipple, and not just because I’m short and have puny muscles! Instead of trying to insert myself between every bone, wearing myself down between the body parts, I need to be more like the coxswain in this race: Sitting where I can look forward to see what is coming down the river, calling out strategy in my quiet but firm voice, motivating, speaking the truth in love, keeping us rowing together that way, united in the “one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” I need to be the coxswain keeping and articulating the vision, the vision that is more important than anyone’s specific joint pain or rubbing of bone on bone.

         In a book on congregations, I recently read that it is easy for us to “stay mired in automatic behaviors.” It is easy to forget that we “have come together for something more than self-preservation … [to see] that [we] form a whole to respond to something larger than [our]selves.”[2] I think that this is what the apostle Paul was warning the Ephesians about, as well. We cannot speed ahead unless the bones become a Body, a common network, a united frame of tendon and ligament, a whole that is focused not only on serving as Christ’s Body in the world, but that is also taking responsibility for cultivating humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and peace within. As your coxswain, perched up here in the pulpit, I am calling us to row together, to work together with the precision of the Olympic athletes that we are in Jesus Christ, strengthening the ligaments of love that hold us together.

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[1] Juliet Macur, “On Rowing Team, Smallest Body has the Most Authority,” New York Times, August 1, 2010, found at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/sports/olympics/voice-of-authority-directs-us-womens-rowing-team.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=general&src=me.

[2] Peter L. Steinke, How Your Church Family Works: Understanding Congregations as Emotional Systems ( Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 1993), 72.