Manna (Proper 13B)

Manna

Proper 13B
5 August 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15; Psalm 78:23-29; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When Elena and I were living in China, we would occasionally come back to the U.S.to reconnect.  At times we would be asked how many meals we had to eat each day, since, “a half hour after you eat Chinese food, you’re hungry again.”   We would politely smile and say gently that we had become accustomed to food there, and found it every bit as satisfying as western food.  “We eat more rice with our Chinese meals than you probably do here.   Staple foods, whether rice or bread, fill you up and stay with you.” 

Sustenance!  Sustenance with staying power!  This is what we all need.  Because of this, hunger has become a metaphor for all human needs and desires.  Bruce Springsteen sings of having a “hungry heart.”  Van Morrison sings “I’m hungry for your love.”  We say that a particularly well-staged production here in this village of theater and music is a “feast for eye and ear.” A person ready to do a job with vigor and advance her career is described as “hungry.”

We speak of “comfort food,” revealing an uncomfortable fact that sometimes we transfer our needs and discomfort from other areas in life to food and eating.  So some of us alas, become fat due to neediness we seek to satisfy as if it were hunger.

Similarly, we often experience simple physical hunger, especially when coupled with exhaustion, as overwhelming and larger spiritual need.   That is one of the reasons that fasting is such a prevalent spiritual practice in many traditions. 

Sometimes, it is hard to sort out all the various needs we feel. 

Abraham Maslow talks about a hierarchy of needs:  at the bottom are the physiological needs.  Then there are the basic needs for safety and security, followed by love and belonging. A need for esteem comes next.  This is followed by self-actualization and transcendence.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes of a need in the heart of every human being.  Addressing God in prayer, he says, “For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you.”   In this view, all our hungers are rooted in a single hunger of the creature for creator, a hunger only the creator can satisfy.  There is a hole in the middle of each human heart, and that hole has the shape of God. 

This most basic and important need in traditional Christian teaching can be satisfied only by the enjoyment of the presence of God made known to us, whether in the end time, or in glimpses through God’s indwelling spirit here and now.  This beatific vision is the Christian doctrine analogous to Buddhist enlightenment and nirvana.  But where in Buddhism, enlightenment comes through abandonment of all attachments and eradication the feeling of any need, in Christianity the conscious enjoyment of God’s beauty satisfies all want, fills every need, even while it stimulates ever-intensifying desire.   The presence of God both satisfies and feeds our hungers. 

The idea is expressed well in a line in one of my favorite hymns:

Joy and triumph everlasting
Hath the heav’nly Church on high;
For that pure immortal gladness
All our feast days mourn and sigh.

... There the body hath no torment,
There the mind is free from care,
There is every voice rejoicing,
Every heart is loving there.
Angels in that city dwell;
Them their King delighteth well:
Still they joy and weary never,
More and more desiring ever.

Today’s Gospel talks about various kinds of hunger, various kinds of need.  In it, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me and partakes will never be hungry again, will never be thirsty again.” 

He is speaking to people who have been trying to catch up with him ever since he fed the 5,000, which we read about last week.  Remember, Jesus has to flee after he had fed the 5,000 because the people wanted to make him their king.  He secretly walks across the sea to escape them.  When they finally find Jesus, he cuts to the heart of the matter, “You are chasing after me not because I showed you marvels from God pointing to hidden truth, but because you filled your bellies with the loaves I gave you,” (John 6:26).  He adds, “Do not work hard for the food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts into timelessness” (John 6:27).

Jesus’ marvelous acts serve a two-fold purpose, addressing different needs and hungers.  At a concrete level, they set people free from tangible burdens such as illness, social isolation, physical disabilities, mental illness, and physical hunger.   But as signs, they point to things beyond themselves. They put God’s love and power on display, and thus reveal God’s reign, and give a glimpse of the beatific vision.  Jesus’ healing and awesome acts of feeding those in need point to the truth that, indeed, the Reign of God is in our midst, and that God is, here and now, fully in charge.

Jesus scolds the people who have been chasing him because they can’t see beyond his satisfying their lower needs to see the glimpse of true glory that offers in these acts.  

Do we have eyes to see glimpses of God’s glory and ears to hear whispers and echoes of God’s voice when these are offered us?

If we don’t, our relationship with Jesus by definition is manipulative and exploitive.   We are using Jesus to obtain whatever it is that we feel we acutely need.  In so doing, we shun any authentic relationship with Jesus, and miss “finding our rest in God,” as Augustine put it.  We settle for satisfying only our simplest needs, and thus sell ourselves cheap.  We chase after Jesus because he fed us loaves and not because he showed us a glimpse of God at work.  

It’s not that these lesser needs and hungers are unimportant.  It’s just that chasing after them, as if it is all that is important, misses the crucial piece of what God is up to in sending us Jesus.   

“Don’t work for the food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts forever” (John 6:27), says Jesus.  He is thinking of the story of the manna in Exodus, where the bread from heaven spoils each evening, requiring the Israelites to gather it each day excepting Sabbaths.   “The bread that lasts forever” is for Jesus that which satisfies the deepest needs as well as the shallowest.  “I am that bread,” he says.

What’s curious here is this—this bread too must be gathered each day, though it lasts forever.  The problem is not that this bread spoils, but that this is living bread, and to nurture and foster anything living, you need to be constantly attentive.  

 

That is why the Lord’s Prayer in Luke says, “give us each day our daily bread,” or, better, “our bread for the coming day, for the morrow.”

The paradox here results from the intersection of the timeless, ever present Beatific Vision and our day-to-day, hand-to-mouth experience of it within time.  Remember the angels in the city of God in that hymn I quoted, “Still they joy and weary never, More and more desiring ever”? 

The idea is that the contemplation of the Divine Beauty is not simple satisfaction of a hunger, once felt and now managed, not simple rest found in God after restlessness apart from God.  In the timelessness of the Eternal presence, our need and our satisfaction are experienced at the same, eternally present moment.  Our hunger and our being fully satisfied are experienced as two aspects of enjoying the Beatific Vision.  It is an experience of being in the present moment, lost in timeless beauty.  And it is an experience of joy. 

Translating that into the here and now of our daily experience in time, it means that though the sustenance this bread gives lasts forever, we must be constantly feeding on it.  Otherwise, this bread is not living, and we have mistaken the Bread of Life for mere Bakery Goods.

Scots poet and minister George MacDonald wrote the following: 

“In holy things may be unholy greed.

Thou giv’st a glimpse of many a lovely thing,

Not to be stored for use in any mind,

But only for the present spiritual need.

The holiest bread, if hoarded, soon will breed

The mammon-moth, the having-pride, I find.”

Sisters and Brothers, we live in a world awash with need, inundated with hunger, and begging for our help.  We ourselves are conflicted messes of competing desires and hungers.  The very fact that we continue to have all our various needs and hungers, whether in a hierarchy or not, tells us that we are living in enemy-occupied territory.  And so the glimpse of glory, the dim hint of the Beatific Vision we gain through our experience of Jesus in the here and now, is very important. 

 

We must follow Jesus in trying to make the Reign of God present.  We must follow Jesus in trying to meet human hunger and need of all types. 

But, we must also be confident that satisfying want is not all there is. 

 

In offering himself to us as “bread from heaven,” living bread that must be partaken each and every day, Jesus offers us all his Father’s richest satisfaction of all needs and hungers.  

 

But our experience of this here and now is by definition partial, and can only hint at the glory to come.  But it is sufficient.  St. Julian of Norwich said of Jesus’ promise to feed us, and sustain us, the following: “He did not say, You will never have a rough passage, you will never be over-strained, you will never feel uncomfortable, but he did say You will never be overcome.”

In the coming week, I invite us all to do a spiritual exercise, a thought experiment to try to discover our motives.  Why do you come to Church, why do you pray, why do you serve, why do you try to resist temptation or avoid doing bad things, why do you give offerings and alms?  Why do you seek Jesus?   Identify this as best you can, and then label it as “filling my belly with loaves.”  Then image you are standing face to face with Jesus, who says, “You are seeking me not because you saw signs from God pointing to greater things, deeper needs met, but because I met this specific need for you.”    And then try to imagine him simply holding you in his arms, and saying, “But that’s all right.  I have much more to offer.  Let me show you the way.”    

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

An Eternal Weight of Glory (Proper 5B)

An Eternal Weight of Glory
10 June 2012 Second Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 5B

Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 130; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-25

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

These last two weeks, the last week of May and the first week of June, have been very hard for me for many years.  In 1989, I had just arrived in Beijing China as a new Cultural Affairs Officer, and I was there in the last heady days of the democracy demonstrations on Tian’anmen Square and through the bloody military crackdown and political suppression that followed.   I was particularly unlucky as a foreign diplomat for being in the wrong place at the wrong time on a couple of occasions, and I saw things that people should never have to see.   I was haunted for years, particularly during those two weeks, by vivid nightmares that made me afraid to go asleep.  One of the common manifestations of Post-tramautic Stress Disorder is depression, and I suffered from it for years.   Bad sleep, followed by an inability to get up in the morning, disrupted eating patterns, a loss of the joy in life, and a general alienation of feelings and shutting down of emotional life and the disruption in human relations that come from this—all these and more are symptoms of the horrible demon that is depression.  Thanks to a very loving wife, some kind and wise talk therapists, some great exercise trainers, support groups, and newer anti-depressant medicines that came onto the market in the 1990s, I was able to finally overcome the depression.  When we moved back to Beijing in 2009, and we went into the feared two week period in 2010, I slept soundly and without nightmares.  This last week, I had one slightly vivid dream including scenes from that terrible time 23 years ago, but this was not drenched with the dread, horror, and nausea of a full-bore nightmare.  My own pain associated with those events is minor compared with the Chinese people who died, lost family members, were seriously injured, or simply loss hope.  I feel very blessed to be over the depression, and remember those who suffered so in my prayers.     

All of us have burdens and painful experiences.  As we age, lose our vitality and health, and come closer to our own deaths, the weight of such burdens can grow.

Many people feel guilty at suffering from deep depression or hopelessness.  Having heard somewhere that “despair is a sin,” they tend to look on depression, feelings of helplessness or hopelessness, and even acute mourning and sorrow like homesickness or nostalgia as if they were character flaws, sins, or at the least the result of a disturbing lack of faith or trust in God.  We must not do this.  It is not only untrue, but deeply damages our ability to do what is necessary to come out of depression. 

When St. Thomas Aquinas defined “despair” as the gravest of sins (Summa Theologica, Part I, I.20.3), he was talking about the willful choice of denying God’s effective grace and love, including a suite of acts of moral dissolution rooted in such a denial. Few think his discussion applies to the emotional state we call depression.  Significantly, he cites St. Isidore, who says that where committing an evil act may incur God’s wrath, despair is falling into the pains of Hell itself.   

Most modern psychologists and pastoral counselors agree that emotions are things we experience, and that it is all right to have the whole range of emotions.  What matters, and where our moral responsibility comes in, is not what emotions we experience, but in what we do with our emotions. 

Those of us who pray the Book of Psalms on a daily basis, understand very quickly that the whole range of human emotion is found there, from the sublime heights of thankfulness and exultation at the beauty of God to the depraved depths of rage, anger, and vengeance.  Their presence in the Psalter teaches us it is alright to have the whole range of human feelings.  We are only human, after all, and accepting who we are and what God made us means accepting our human condition and emotions.  But again, the key is what we make of them, and how we act or do not act on them. 

St. Paul, in today’s epistle, writes the following,

“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer selves are withering away, our inner selves are being renewed each and every day. For our current bit of suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any possible comparison, because we are looking not at what is before our eyes, but at what is hidden from our eyes; for what can be seen passes quickly away, but what cannot be seen lasts forever”  (2 Cor. 4:16-17).

Paul ’s teaching here at first glance seems to disparage the world in which we live, the world before our eyes.  Remember that when God made the world, God saw it and said it was good indeed.  Elsewhere, Paul very clear that he sees plenty of evidences in the world of God’s good intention and love in the world.  What Paul is talking about in today’s passage is how things seem when we are suffering from some ill and unable to see any good before our eyes. 

He says that what keeps us going in such straits is the vision we have inside our hearts of the important things.   Recognizing that all human life ends in sickness and death, he uses a commonplace from Stoic philosophy: the world is changing and reliably unreliable.  What really matters by contrast—the true, the beautiful, and the good—is unchanging.  It is the vision of this in our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart.”

The word Paul uses for “losing heart” literally means “being beaten down by bad things.”    He contrasts our sufferings, changeable and limited in time, with the unchanging timelessness of the Shining Brilliance around the person of God.  This brilliance is the glory of God, in Hebrew, kavod, or substantial heaviness.  Paul says that our “momentary” sufferings are very light and insubstantial by comparison with this “weight of glory” around God, a timeless beauty that our sufferings actually are creating in us, unseen.  He says that the substantiality of God’s light is literally a “hyperbole beyond all hyperboles,” immeasurable, timeless. 

It is important here to note that Paul is not trying to say that our sufferings are not real or truly bad.  And he is not saying the world is simply bad and needs to be ignored.  He is contrasting how things now appear with how things actually are and will be.

For Paul, the hidden “eternal weight of glory” or “timeless mass of Light” currently being created in us is actually the real thing, while our suffering, all too clear before our eyes, is but a dim shadow, an unsubstantial trifle, that is passing away.    The image in our hearts of what God has promised, and what God is already actually accomplishing in us, drives away the demons of hopelessness and helplessness that threaten to beat us down. 

Paul is advising a path of contemplation, of reflection, as a way of driving away despair, of being “renewed every day” so that “we do not lose heart.”

My father used to sing a popular song from his youth, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, watch out for Mr. in-between.”  This is just part of what Paul is trying to say. 

Paul tells us to contemplate the “invisible things” which do not change instead of the “things before our eyes” that do. 

His argument parallels Saint-Exupery’s belief that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”   

In order to break out of hopelessness, you have to change the dialog going on inside your head.  The dialog inside a depressed person’s head is an argument that he or she can only lose.  Talking of constitutional melancholy, Samuel Johnson observed, “A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them”  (Boswell’s Life of Johnson). 

It might be as simple as finding memories, stories, or images that embolden and inspire us.  In Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden finds his release and freedom simply through continued memory of McMurphy’s bravery, as badly as that turned out.

For Paul, the ultimate reassuring image is that of God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the world.  That is why he dwells so much on  “Christ, Christ on the Cross” and the Risen Lord.  It is why he talks so much about God’s loving promises. 

In the words of two African-American freedom songs, one a Spiritual and the other a Work Song, Paul wants us to “keep our eyes on the prize,” and our “hands on the plough.”  He wants us to “hold on, hold on.” 

Friends, occasional feelings of hopelessness and helplessness are part of being human.  Depression is something that most of us can expect to experience at one time or another.  You don’t have to be alone.  Just as sharing joys with another seem to double our happiness, sharing sorrows with another seems to lighten them. If you are truly depressed, you may need to see a physician or counselor.  The medications now available can help put a bottom in your sinking boat so that you can begin the hard work of bailing the water out.  If you ever start thinking about doing harm to yourself or others, you need immediately to talk to a professional for help.

For most of us, simply worn down by life and its sorrows, it may not be as dramatic as that.  But we must not resign ourselves to being beaten down, and we must not, in Paul’s words, “lose heart.”  The actor Tom Bosley (the guy who played Richie’s father on Happy Days) said, “Many people think that depression is something you just have to live with when you get older, but it’s not.”

We too need to talk and share.  And we need to contemplate the glorious good things of God, not present before our everyday eyes, beaten down as we are. 

In the coming week, I want each of us to be sure to take time each day to simply sit in quiet for a few minutes and thankfully reflect on God’s beauty—in the natural world around us, in the lives and examples of good people whose stories we have heard or whom we have known, in the sacred stories we tell each other, and in the glorious promises given those who trust in God.  Simply reflect, contemplate.  Don’t let the committee inside your head start discussing matters, good or ill.  Just sit and look on.  See with your heart, not your eyes.  And as you do, feel the weight of that glory growing, feel the warmth of that great light burning brighter, and the burden of your pain getting lighter. 

In the name of God, Amen.