Sermon (Fr. Peay) August 5, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church - Delafield, Wisconsin

11thSunday after Pentecost ‑‑ August 2, 2009

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[Texts:Exodus 16:2-4,9-15 /Ephesians 4:1‑16/John 6:24‑35]

     When I was a kid you saw ‘Wonder Bread’ advertised everywhere. I grew up in Indianapolis and that’s where ‘Wonder Bread’ was first baked back in 1921. The advertisements early on said that “a wonder was coming;” evidently the owner of the bakery had been impressed by a balloon ascension at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Later Buffalo Bob on ‘Howdy Doody’ said that we should look for the “red, yellow and blue balloons on the wrapper” and that “’Wonder Bread’ builds strong bodies 8 ways.” (He was talking about the nutrients added to the flour – which had been bleached and stripped of its natural nutrients. Later, they would add 12 nutrients.) All I knew was that I thought we should get it and nagged my mother until we did. Good advertising, so-so enriched bleached white flour bread. In college I would hear a philosophy professor refer to it as “pictures of bread pasted on dough.” A profound and observant man, my professor; when given the choice, I don’t think I’ve taken a slice of bleached flour bread since. ‘Wonder Bread’ was hardly a wonder, when you think of it, but it sold itself. I guess we all need a little wonder, especially if it can build bodies eight or even twelve different ways! 

Perhaps that is why people came flocking after Jesus on the opposite side of the lake. They were looking for a little wonder and this fellow had taken a few loaves of ordinary bread and fed a great crowd of people. When they met Jesus they asked him exactly the wrong question, so he gave them the answer to the question they shouldhave asked. They should have asked what those signs they had seen meant, what they pointed to, and not how to get the wonder bread. Jesus told them to ask about the sign so that they could find out about something far more valuable than the wonder bread. If they sought after the meaning of the sign, then they could find out about the food that was available for eternal life. What they saw was only a sign of something far deeper given by God the Father through the Son of man – the real wonder bread.

God's covenant promise of presence and care is sealed through the Bread of Life. A seal is something, which guarantees authenticity. In our day it guarantees freshness; for example, did you know that the color tie on the ‘Wonder Bread’ loaf tells you what day it was baked? On the other hand, seals also show that a product hasn't been tampered with, like the seals on dairy products and the like. Jesus is the seal of the Father's covenant activity. Jesus has the full credentials to offer the gift of new life, of participation in the divine nature that God desires to share with us.  

Jesus tells the crowd, "Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you.” He’s saying that he will show us the way to build bodies – our own, the community and beyond – in one way, following Him. Finally, the crowd asked the correct question, a question, which is still at the core of the search for spiritual meaning: "What must we do to be doing the works of God?" The answer is quite straightforward: "This is the work of God, that you believe in him who he has sent." In short, to do the work of God is to have faith. The essential disposition to receive the Bread of Life, the real wonder bread, is to believe in Jesus, to accept his message and to follow his example. The Bread of Life, and all that it brings, is available to us when we allow ourselves to believe. Moreover, belief is not a simple intellectual assent to a series of propositions. Someone who believes lives a life molded by and transformed by, those beliefs.

To come to real belief is not as simple as it appears. Given what these people had already experienced, you would think they would have responded right then and there. However, they were still looking for the red, yellow and blue balloons. So their response is, "So, show us something, do something so that we can believe in you." Their attitude is one of disbelief and resistance to the message set before them. They immediately took a defensive posture and began to look to their religious history for precedent. The crowd argued with Jesus that their ancestors had received a visible sign from God, the manna in the wilderness. Now, what was Jesus going to do to top the sign given through the hands of Moses? 

The truth is there is never enough proof for those who need to have things proved to them. They saw what Jesus did in feeding the crowd. They saw the departure of the disciples in the boat long before Jesus left them, yet he was there in Capernaum and they had not seen him on the road or walked with him. So how did he get there? The visible signs were there, but they were still not enough. By comparison, the true bread from heaven given now (Jesus) makes the manna of Moses' day completely insignificant. The Bread of Life offered now doesn't just sustain human life in the wilderness; it transforms the wilderness, the alienation and self‑centeredness of human life itself! Yet, and here is the tragedy, nothing is helpful to those who are not prepared to receive God's gift as he gives it and not as we want it. The crowd didn't want the true bread from heaven, they wanted Burger King -- they wanted it their way. God's way is not our way; it is the way of self‑giving love.

"Lord, give us this bread always." They asked for the bread not understanding what it really is. The bread that never leaves one hungry is not a commodity. One does not buy this bread. Rather, one enters into relationship with it. The Bread of Life is not a thing, but a person. The crowd was in conversation with the true Bread which "had come down from heaven" and hadn't a clue with whom they were speaking. The hunger that is filled is the hunger for meaning, for acceptance, and for self‑understanding. The Bread of Life assuages the hunger for all of what it means to be human, an embodied spirit, knowing that there is more to us than we can see or ever hope to understand. When we open ourselves to what God has done in and through Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, and through his teaching of radical, self‑giving love, then we are fed and need hunger no more. We are restored to that for which we hunger ‑‑ full humanity. And the real wonder bread builds strong bodies, our own and then joins us in community with those around us.

This is the wonder of what Jesus did by the lake. When he took those five barley loaves, the common food of common people, and made them feed the crowd he did something far more than magic. It was symbolic of what he does with our humanity. Jesus takes his own human nature and makes something special of it through his self‑giving love. The story of the Eucharist, which is symbolically tied with this sixth chapter of John's Gospel, is more than just a ritual‑surrounded sacrament, but a continual sign of God's care for us given through unpretentious, ordinary, everyday things. What we come to understand is that all of life is Eucharistic, and what we do in the sacraments is merely a reminder that this is the case with all of life itself. When we "do the work of God," have faith and live in an unselfish manner life's hidden meaning is opened to us and we know what it is to be fully, truly human. Not only that, to see all of life Eucharistically ‑‑ as an opportunity for sharing the Divine presence and offering thanksgiving ‑‑ is to rescue one's self and life itself from boredom! Why? Because when we open ourselves to the Father, as did Jesus, we begin to realize that ALL of life is filled with wonder. 

Each time we come together around the table God offers to renew this relationship of the extraordinary in the ordinary. What God offers to us implies a response on our part. Our response to God's covenant is live life in Eucharistic fashion ‑‑ broken, shared, poured‑out for the sake of others.

 This manner of life will enable us, as Paul said, "to speak the truth in love." In other words, we can be a community more concerned about honesty and growth than simply about being nice. Jesus spoke the truth in love, because his life was consonant with the teaching he offered: he became the bread broken and shared for others. To speak the truth in love is more than just offering criticism or pithy observations on what we see not being done. Rather, it is born out of our doing the tasks at hand and inviting others by means of our actions – it’s building the body of the community through honest interaction.  It’s also being willing to own our faults and open ourselves to change, so that we might be the people God created us to be. 

Unfortunately, many people take the position I read in the journal Leadership:

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

[Wilbur Rees, Leadership, vol. 4, no. 1]

The real wonder bread isn’t an easily purchased or comfortable commodity. Rather, it works transformation, it will make us uncomfortable, because it makes us grow and with growth comes change. 

            I leave you with wise words from a great soul who knew and feasted on the real wonder bread, the great theologian of the early Church, Irenaeus, who said: 

It is not you who shapes God, it is God who shapes you. If then you are the

work of God, await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season. Offer

God your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has

fashioned you. Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint

of God’s fingers.

The real wonder bread doesn’t come packaged with red, yellow and blue balloons. Rather it comes packaged in people, and in communities of faith, who love and live as Jesus did. 

Sermon (Fr Peay) July 22, 2018

The Episcopal Church of St. John Chrysostom - Delafield, Wisconsin

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – July 22, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[Texts: Ephesians 2:11-22/Mark 6:30-34, 53-56]

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.    Mark 6:31

            R & R, rest and relaxation, it was the great goal of American society, especially post-World War II. As a result, we live in an incredible time. The labor-saving technologies we’ve developed have enabled us to work just about anywhere and at any time. Drive or walk down the street and there are people on the telephone, which is more a hand-held personal data device  The laptop computer, along with the wireless internet connection keep us in touch with all the people and data we need to keep on working and in social contact. Add to that mix all the in-home devices, ‘smart’ vacuums, appliances, and on and on, that are meant to make life easier. They keep us in touch even when we’d rather be out of touch! So our great fight to move from the heavy work week of an agricultural economy has brought us beyond the forty hour week to the how-many-hours-are-there-in-the-week week!

            Work, work, work – even while we’re “up north” or off wherever we may go to vacation, work is right there. What is more, we’ve even gotten to the point that we schedule our leisure time. We set up times for golf, for tennis, to work out, to swim, even to take a walk. Everything has to fit into a schedule and the schedule fits into the ever-looming, always present specter of what we need to accomplish in order to achieve what our society considers success. We’re not laboring in the fields or in the factories like we used to do, now we’re laboring everywhere and just about all the time – R and R seems almost as elusive for us as it did for our ancestors in the fields and the factories.

            So Mark’s description of the experience Jesus and the disciples had on that long ago day in Galilee could easily describe many of us gathered here today. Not to mention those who are far too busy to come to church. “They did not have leisure even to eat.” Isn’t it sad that the drive-thru fast-food restaurant, “Grubhub,” “Blue Box,” and all of our labor-saving devices weren’t around in Jesus’ day? Maybe the Gospel would read differently? Maybe they would have ordered up dinner on the internet? Maybe they would have ‘DoorDash’ed for Chinese? And Jesus fed the five thousand – dim sum all around.  I don’t think so.

            What we’re hearing in the Gospel is the perennial situation of human beings who keep forgetting that God has made them with a spot inside themselves that can only be filled by God. There is a desire in us for a rest, a peace that all of the money success can buy can’t give us. The kind of leisure we’re looking for doesn’t come on a cruise, or doing a trip to a favorite spot, or even sitting by a lake with a good book – as good as all of those things are. In fact, sometimes our search for leisure, for rest, apart from nourishing our spirits is just one more sign of the deep need within us all.

I came across something from Mary Hinkle’s book, Signs of Belonging, which seems to make the point.

 Most debilitating for the glorifying and enjoying of God is just the fact that “life happens.” Days fill up with small events, duties, and responsibilities until we have succumbed to the temptation, as Annie Dillard says, “to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.” We just don’t notice anything anymore. I once heard the Lutheran writer and teacher Gerhard Frost comment that he had asked a rancher how sheep get lost. “It’s easy,” the rancher replied. “They just put their heads down and nibble themselves lost.” [Signs of Belonging (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), p. 71]

How many of us are nibbling ourselves lost with all of the good and important and necessary things we have to do each day and each week? It’s easily done, God knows I know that from personal experience, and sometimes we need to be reminded that in the midst of life happening that there is more. There is more to life and more to us and just more, if we’ll only take the time to step back, slow down, and realize it.

            One of the reasons I’m grateful for the Lectionary, both the weekly three-year cycle that we tend to use here, and the daily one that informs my personal prayer and meditation, is that it forces me to read and look at Scripture I might otherwise ignore. There is a lot of good material in Mark’s Gospel that I can sink my teeth into and just slip past the text we read today. However, how can any of it honestly make sense unless I’ve heard, and listened deeply, to the invitation Jesus makes to his disciples, “come apart and rest”? That invitation is as surely to me and to you as it was to them. They needed to get away, debrief, and make sense of what was going on as “life happened” around them. They needed to remember anew what was important, what the real priorities are as “life happens” – and so do we.

            One of the best books that I know on prayer is by the late Russian bishop Anthony Bloom. Beginning to Pray addresses how we can sort out what is really important in the midst of busy lives. One of the first things Bloom does is to remind us that God is always there for us. We may open ourselves for an hour a week or even an hour a day, but we have to remember that God is there, waiting for all the others. Part of our “coming apart” has to be realizing the presence of God that is always there and beginning to raise our consciousness to experience or be aware of that Divine presence. Part of it is just allowing ourselves to stand in the present and open ourselves to the “now” of God in that moment. When Bloom talks about the intersection of time and eternity in the now he sounds like someone who wrote two hundred years earlier, Jean-Pierre de Caussade,

who described it as the “sacrament of the present moment.”

            How do we come to appreciate this? We stop, Bloom says, and allow ourselves to do nothing. We place ourselves in the presence of God, at the intersection of time and eternity, and discover what it means to be in the “now.” What it takes to do this is five minutes of leisure that we can guarantee will not be interrupted – read that we will not allow to be interrupted. Here is the moment, as little as three and a half or five minutes Bloom says, that can allow us to begin to get in touch with who we are and with who God is. We don’t need to do elaborate prayers. Bloom says that we sit down and say to ourselves, “‘I am seated, I am doing nothing, I will do nothing for five minutes,’ and then relax and continually throughout this time (one or two minutes is the most you will be able to endure to begin with) realise, ‘I am here in the presence of God, in my own presence and in the presence of the furniture that is around me, just still, moving nowhere.’” [Beginning to Pray (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), p.85] Once we can come to a still point in the midst of our lives we can open ourselves to see the Divine presence all around us all the rest of the hours of our day, and we need to do that, because life happens and God is there in the midst of it.

            If you want proof of that all you have to do is look at the text from Mark. “And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.” They did what Jesus asked. And, to the best of our ability, here we are, aren’t we? I know many people come here of a Sunday morning seeking a “spiritual tune-up,” a little quiet time, something to fill them up again before they go out and back at it again. However, in the process we can fall into another trap which is just as problematic for our living our lives toward God and one another and growing in unity with God. That trap is thinking that this is the only place where I can get the fill-up or thinking that it is only in structured settings, like a retreat or a get-away, that I can get “spiritual.”  Moments of prayer are sources of spiritual connection, so are times away, but they’re not the only source.

Look at the next line in the text, “Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” While they were going off the deserted place life happened. People recognized Jesus and the disciples, who had just returned from a preaching mission, and they came looking for them. What did Jesus do? He taught them.  Was Jesus breaking his own rule? I don’t think so, but perhaps we are getting a different insight into how we are to approach the balance between sanctification – making our lives holy – and service.

Living it out means that we become instruments of reconciliation, who actively work to heal all antagonisms, divisions, inequality, injustice, and egoism. To “be in Christ,” is to see this and to do something about it, wherever we are. So, we come apart so that we can go back into the midst of life happening all around us and see God at work right in the middle of it. As life happens and all of the busyness crowds in around us we can find the still-point, the calm center, God. When we come to understand this, begin to live in the “now” of God’s presence we will learn that R and R might mean ‘rest and relaxation’ at the outset, but in its fullness it is ‘renewal and reconciliation.’ Regardless of where we are on the R and R meaning chart, we should take some regularly and make the world a different place as a result of it.

Sermon (Fr Cunningham) July 22, 2018

I was recently reading an article by the psychologist Clay Routledge in which he was discussing his new book entitled, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of Invisible World.  His book is, among other things, a sort of survey of the current religious landscape.  It is filled with fascinating information like, “Young adults are less religious than older generations but are more inclined to believe in ghosts, astrology, and clairvoyance.”  He uses facts like this to conclude that, “People may be looking to nontraditional beliefs in their search for meaning, but there are reasons to doubt that those are effective substitutes for religion. Religion may be a uniquely powerful meaning resource because, in addition to providing a needed space for spiritual engagement, it binds individuals to a meaning-sustaining social fabric. Many alternatives to traditional religion are products of an increasingly individualistic culture, more focused on personal interests and less on social duties. However, the more a belief system promotes interdependence, the more likely it is to enhance meaning.”  In other words people still believe in something beyond themselves, but not in a way that binds them to their fellow man, rather in ways that are individualist and divisive.  I bring this up today because of the discussion that Paul is having in his letter to the Ephesians.  He states, “Remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called ‘the uncircumcision’ by those who are called ‘the circumcision’ —a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands— remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”  Just a quick summary of what he says.  There was Israel and God’s chosen people the Jews.  When Christ came the exclusiveness of this relationship was open to all and now, for lack of a better term, we are all free to be God’s chosen people. 

So lets go back to our current day and age where the trend of our society is to seek meaning beyond ourselves in ways that separate us one from another.  If you want to put it in terms of thermodynamics Paul is claiming a sort of inverse of the second law which basically states that ordered systems tend towards disorder.  Paul today is saying that in Christ a disordered systems, that is separation and alienation among individuals, moves towards order or put another way in Christ there is unity.  That which had previously divided has been made one through the blood of Christ.  And I think that is no small thing especially in our times where our common bonds are deteriorating.  If you do not believe me let me give you just one quick example.  The following comes from the statistician Nate Silver’s website.  It states in looking at the last presidential election, “More than 61 percent of voters cast ballots in counties that gave either Clinton or Trump at least 60 percent of the major-party vote last November. That’s up from 50 percent of voters who lived in such counties in 2012 and 39 percent in 1992 — an accelerating trend that confirms that America’s political fabric, geographically, is tearing apart.”  More people are choosing to live with their own kind to the exclusion of others. 

And there are at least two ways that you can look at this deterioration with concern.  The first is in a sort of cultural anthropological way acknowledging that as Lincoln pointed out in the Gettysburg Address a house divided against itself cannot stand.  In other words a certain amount of cohesion is needed to have a functioning society and the less cohesion, the less functioning.  As we continue to separate ourselves one from another it is hard to see how there will not be serious consequences. 

The second way to lament this phenomenon for us Christians is to be saddened that so many have abandoned the unity that is found in Christ and are instead busying themselves with poor substitutes.  Those who have given up the Son of God are now chasing after ghosts and quasi-religious hucksters who offer the spiritual equivalent of a fake Rolex.  It only appears genuine if you don’t look to closely or try to go swimming with it.  And while it can sometimes be enjoyable to look out at the world and inventory all of the people who are wrong, God’s call on our lives goes beyond this.  For in many ways Christians have been just as guilty at establishing this redoubt like mentality – cordoning themselves off from the heathen.  But this is not the call of unity, the call that Paul shows us today.  We are called to show people the real thing.  To show people the beauty of the unity that is found in Christ alone.  And to do this we cannot just preach to the choir or live in Christian cul-de-sacs.

            But we must also acknowledge that this is something of a hard message to convey in our day and age because most everyone carries around an unquestioned bit of postmodernism within them.  Postmodernism is many things, but the one we often hear about and are asked to accept as a virtue is the very personal nature of meaning.  That is we are supposed to be non-judgmental and think our version of the human condition to be any better than anyone else’s.  If we do, we are seen as exclusionist, as in saying Jesus is the way, the truth and the light.  But what we read from Paul today does not seem exclusionary in the least.  In fact it all sounds rather inclusionary.  It is the gathering of the entire human family under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  The more post-modern type would claim exclusivity to such a notion because it only comes through one means, but even if we are guilty of that charge it does not make it wrong. 

I want to read a bit from two of my favorite authors to explain both the current reality and the sort of vision glorious that Paul describes today.  First in C.S. Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, he identifies much of our present breakdown in his description of hell.  This is not the hell of flames and demons poking people in the butt with pitchforks, but rather it is a sort of rainy bleak landscape.  Lewis states when describing the people in hell: “The trouble is they’re so quarrelsome.  As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street.  Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbor.  Before the week is over he’s quarreled so badly that he decides to move.  Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarreled with their neighbors – and moved.  If so he settles in.  If by any chance the street is full, he goes further.  But even if he stays, it makes no odds.  He’s sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he’ll move on again.  Finally he’ll move right out to the edge of town and build a new house…That’s how the town keeps on growing.”  It is a rather interesting version of hell.  The main feature is not torment but is rather complete and total individualism, wherein everybody is the arbiter of his or her own truth.  They quarrel because everyone believes that they are right and will not submit to anything greater than their own personal will and own personal sense of right and wrong.  Now a more modern type of person might say that this is the price we pay for true freedom where we are not oppressed by silly outdated rules and mores – we are free to live in disharmony, never submitting ourselves to something greater.  But let’s think about rules for a moment and turn to someone else.      

            The second piece that I want to briefly read comes from G.K. Chesterton’s book, “Orthodoxy.”  In it he calls the submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ as submitting to doctrine and discipline.  He writes, “Doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But [if] the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice….when their friends return to them they [would find them] all huddled in terror in the centre of the island.”   It all sounds counter intuitive to our postmodern ear.  The idea that true freedom is found through submission to Jesus; True freedom being possible only within the walls of Christianity.  To walk in Christ’s will and delight in his ways is where we find unity and liberation.  When we don’t play within the walls of the freedom found in Christ we develop our own walls, but these walls are not inclusive but rather exclusive.  They are used to keep others out rather than the parameters by which we are all united. 

            Our world is becoming more fractured and this is a cause for some alarm.  And part of our job on this earth is to show people the beauty and the unity that is found in submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ where true freedom is found; a freedom that unifies rather than divides.  And this freedom is what we are called to and what we are to call others to so that we may be Christ’s own both now and forevermore.