No Longer Children
Proper 13B
2 August 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
2 August 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily
Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
at
the Parish Church of Trinity Ashland
Diocese
of Oregon
God,
take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
In our world of i-phones, auto-correct spelling
in word-processing programs, Siri, and speech-to-text applications, we are
accustomed to seeing misunderstood speech.
A recent article I read on Patheos (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2015/07/because-cotillions-other-episcopal-autocorrect-fails/ ) listed amusing ways the
author had seen such programs misunderstand the phrase “Episcopalians”:
Ask Italians
Because cotillions
This companion
The problem is so common that “DYA!” followed by
what you intended to say is a way of saying the typo was not your fault: “Damn you, autocorrect!” means “I did not
intend these words at all!”
Laughable misunderstanding is not confined to
computers, and is not a new phenomenon.
The Reverend William Spooner, with his famous misspeakings both real and
spuriously attributed to him, comes to mind:
“the Lord is a shoving leopard,” “it is kisstomary to cuss the bride,”
and so forth.
There many scenes in the Gospel of John where
people misunderstand sayings of Jesus, and profoundly so. When Jesus tells Nicodemus that we must be
born from on high, Nicodemus replies, “Huh?
How can I crawl back inside my mother’s belly? I won’t fit!” (3:4). When Jesus tells the
Samaritan woman at the well that he offers her the living water of God, she
replies, “How’s that? The well is deep
and you have neither rope nor bucket!” (4:11). When he tries to make her understand by
saying that the water he offers will quench thirst forever, she dully says, “Sir,
give me this water so I never have to be thirsty, or draw water again!” (4:15).
The misunderstanding here comes from taking an
outward symbol for the inward thing it points to. John is saying, “Don’t take things too
literally; you’ll miss the real point.”
Last week, we read about the feeding of the
5,000. People misunderstand this, and
Jesus flees. When they finally catch up in today’s reading, he says, “You are hunting me down not because I showed you marvels from God pointing to hidden truth,
but because you filled your bellies with the loaves I gave you.” “Do not work
hard for food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts into timelessness”
(6:26-27).
“How can we do that?” they ask, thinking he is
asking them to work for the next meal he will provide them. Jesus answers, “Just trust me.” “You first show us a sign so we can trust
you,” they reply, reminding him of the great sign from God in the Exodus, the
manna. They are asking him for an
encore, to give them more bread from heaven.
He relies, “That isn’t the true bread I’m talking about. I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me and partakes will never
be hungry again, will never be thirsty again.”
And so the crowd, in words
reminiscent of those of the Samaritan woman, ask, “Sir, give us this bread always” (6:35). It’s
as if Jesus has said the phrase “Episcopal Church” to the computer repeatedly,
and it keeps getting it wrong:
Basketball Church! Abysmal
Church! Pepto-Bismol lurch!
The crowd does not understand that signs from
God are after-the-fact affairs—they point to God after God has moved our hearts, not before. They miss the great truth C.S. Lewis once expressed,
that the one petition that God will never, can never grant, is “encore!”
For John, symbols are only important in that they
point to something greater. Focus only
on the symbol, and you end up thinking the symbol is all there is! The bread
from heaven, the birth from on high, the living water—these are images for
something we cannot see, but is very, very real. If you mistake them for mere bread, natural
birth, or physical water—you miss the point.
There is a deep structure to the truth of
this. Signs confirm rather than
precondition faith because what matters is our heart, the way we see
things. That is why God’s acts in our
lives come after, not before, the stirrings of faith. There, they lead to God. But if we make them a precondition, they lead
away from God. Mistaking a hint, an enticement
from God for the real thing, you forget lose the ability even to imagine that
there something beyond what you see.
At a deeper level, such surface vision results
from a malady of the heart, a distortion of perception that insists that things
be either one thing of the other, that we are separate and apart from what we
see, and that God is far, far away and outside of the world, rather than
beneath and behind all things. We run into this dualism and tendency to take
things literally all too commonly in the world. It is the source of all sorts
of bad religion.
We say God is a Father and Jesus is God’s Son. But rather than seeing these as profound
metaphors of relationship between us and Jesus of Nazareth and the Mystery behind
and beneath life itself, we take them literally and end up thinking of God as a
divine child abuser who needed to torture and kill his child so that his
“wrath” might be “satisfied.”
We say God commands us to do this and not do
this we say, and has given us laws and rules to live by. But rather than understand this as a deep
symbolic way of saying how we are called to better behaviors and renouncing the
actions and ways of being that alienate ourselves and others, we think that God
is a divine lawyer or magistrate up above and over there whose angelic moral
police must be placated by strict adherence to the law or payments of moral or
psychological fines and jail time.
We say the Bible is God’s word. But rather than seeing this as a description
of that baggy and loose collection of holy texts as the varied field notes of
the people in whom God is moving and driving, and the core and canon of a great
dialogue of faith throughout the centuries, we think it contains the literal
words of God transcribed, without error or contradiction. So we end up having to deny the obvious
literal meaning of many of its texts—with their messiness, and
self-contradiction—even as we protest that we are merely following their
literal truth.
Contemplatives call this error dualistic thinking,
or false consciousness. Modern theologians say that it is extrincist or
formalistic thinking that inevitably leads to legalism and sectarianism, rather
than intuitively grasped faith and trust in a living God.
In these stories of misunderstanding, John is
saying that the interior depths of life of the heart and spirit must trump the
external forms of worship, ritual, and adherence to moral law, and that this
must happen in the context of community relationships, both with Jesus and with
each other.
The Epistle reading today also talks about this contrast
between unity and true consciousness and dualistic thinking, between truth and false
consciousness and misunderstanding. It says
our calling is to all humility, gentleness, patience, and love, bearing with
one another, in unity of spirit and the bond of peace: unity not division or duality, peace not
strife, spirit not flesh, inward not outward.
This is why it says there is ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE
baptism, ONE God and Father of all, ONE hope of our calling. Again, a metaphor. We often mistake this as if the text is
calling for a monotone, monolithic, centralized and uniform belief system. Not so!
As Paul says elsewhere, God is one, for God is all in all: the comprehensive unity of inclusion, not the
narrow sectarianism of exclusion. One
God, one faith, one baptism does not mean no variety or diversity. That why it talks here about a variety of
gifts. We are each called to differing services,
roles, and tasks, and given divergent skills and abilities to match the varying
tasks. The goal of this all is to equip us, that is, to give us the tools, for mutual loving service, so that we can build up in each other the trust and knowledge we have in Christ, and arrive at UNITY: to maturity, to the measure of the full
stature of Christ.
To do this, he says, we must no longer be children, tossed to
and fro and blown about by every kind of teaching.
When Jesus says we
must become like children to see God’s Reign, he is saying we must recognize
our helplessness and to be open to things.
Again, a metaphor. He is asking
us to lose our false consciousness, not saying we need to be simple, or
uneducated, compliant with bullies, or silly.
When Ephesians says we must no more be children, it is saying we need to
grow up and face the truth, the glorious truth of our messy lives. No more false consciousness or dualism. No more literalistic misunderstandings. As Hans Urs Van Baltazar wrote, though a
unity of faith might not be possible, a unity of love is.
Friends: we may be amused at the mistakes Siri or
autocorrect make in misunderstanding things, or find Spoonerisms amusing. But
misunderstanding this basic thing about our life, confusing peripherals with the
core, is deadly. It is the difference
between a living, growing faith and the dead end of narrow legalism and fundamentalism.
I pray that we can be
fearless in recognizing metaphor, in accepting the messiness of life, and in
being honest when we see God at work. God
knows, it is hard work. I pray that in
shedding the false consciousness of outward division and distinction we may
come to see how close we are to Jesus, in fact, that we are in him and he in
us, and how this has always been so, that our focus on the unimportant simply
blinded us to this truth. I pray that
as we lose our fears, judgment, and denial, we may grow to see the love beneath
all things. I pray that as we break down
the obscuring facades of fundamentalism and legalism in our hearts, we may
restructure and rebuild the left over pieces into the beautiful and orderly
pattern of unity our Christ has set before us.
I pray that we may truly eat the bread of heaven, and drink the living
water.
In the name of
Christ, Amen.
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