Collecting manna, detail from a stained glass window in Wells
Cathedral;
Fr Lawrence Lew OP,
flickr CCL
Bread from Heaven
Proper 13B
5 August 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
5 August 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily
Delivered by the Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
at
Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland,
Oregon
God,
take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Over my life, I have studied many
new languages. And let me tell you—it is
easy to confuse things and make mistakes!
Once in France, I tried to follow up with an appointment I had made with
an older gentleman. His wife answered
the door and said in French, “I’m sorry he can no longer see you.” “Just two days ago, he seemed keen on talking
to me,” I replied. And then I thought
she said, “No, he has decided” meaning reconsidered. I replied, “There must be some mistake. He really wanted to talk with me.” The woman looked at me in shock, and quivering
in rage she asked me to leave. I only
later realized my mistake. She had not
said “Il a décidé” (He has decided), but rather, “Il est décédé” “He is
deceased.” Similarly, I once told my
beginning Chinese teacher I had eaten scrambled eggs for breakfast: chǎodàn 炒蛋.
Her shocked gasp and wide eyes told me I had not said it right. I had said cāodàn操蛋. I had dropped the F-bomb in Chinese.
Learning a new language means you
will make mistakes. You will
misunderstand and be misunderstood.
Jesus is trying to teach us a new
language, the language of the heart, the language of God. So it is understandable that he will be
misunderstood regularly. Yahweh in the
Hebrew Scriptures similarly is trying to teach the people a new language, a
grammar and vocabulary of ethical monotheism: trust in God and the morals that
go with it. Again, that turf means
misunderstanding.
In today’s Hebrew scripture, Moses
says God will give you bread from heaven!
The people look, and all about there is sticky gum resin from little
desert plants. It doesn’t look like
bread at all, though they find it is edible and quite tasty once they try
it. “What in the world is this?” they
cry: “ma-nah?” And so that become the
name of this bread from heaven, mannah.
There many scenes in the Gospel of
John where people profoundly misunderstand sayings of Jesus. Jesus tells Nicodemus we must be born from on
high. Nicodemus replies, “No one can crawl back into the womb!” (3:4). Jesus tells the woman at the well that he offers
her God’s living water. She replies, “This
well is deep and you have neither rope nor bucket!” (4:11).
These misunderstandings come from mistaking
an outward sign for the inward thing it points to. John is saying, “If you take things too
literally, you’ll miss the real point.”
Last week, we read about the feeding
of the 5,000. The people chase after
Jesus, wanting more. When they finally catch up in today’s Gospel, he says,
“You are hunting me down not because
I showed you signs, but because you filled your bellies… Do not work hard for
food that doesn’t last, but for the food that lasts forever” (6:26-27).
“How can we work for bread?” they
ask, thinking he is asking them to earn the next meal he will provide. Jesus answers, “Just trust me.” “You first show us a sign so we can trust
you,” they reply, reminding him of the bread from heaven in Exodus, food that
lasted only a day before it went bad and had to gathered each day. He relies, “That isn’t the bread I’m talking
about. I am talking about me. 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).
For John, signs are symbols pointing
to and participating in something greater than themselves. They are the vocabulary words and grammar of
the new language Jesus is teaching us. Focus
only on the symbol, and you end up thinking the symbol is all there is! Bread
from heaven, birth from on high, 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. If you expect that bread from
heaven is always going to look like baked loaves, you’ve misunderstood. You’ve made the mistake of a first-year
language student.
Our inability to speak this new
language of Jesus stems from our broken hearts.
Our twisted vision insists that things be either one thing or 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. This dualism makes us take things literally
all too often, and 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 that, 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 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.
Today’s Epistle talks about this
contrast between unity and dualistic thinking, between true and false
consciousness, between understanding and misunderstanding. It says we are called to unity and loving
kindness because we already live in a world so structured: ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism, ONE God and
Father of all, ONE hope of our calling.
Again, a metaphor. Paul is not calling
for a monotone, monolithic, centralized and uniform church. 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. Rather, it is a variety of gifts, differing
services, roles, skills, and tasks. It
is also differing failings to be amended gently, through bearing with each
other, forgiving each other, and speaking truth in love. The goal of this all 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 community: unity in our diversity. To use another metaphor from today’s
readings, we become what we eat by consuming the bread of heaven each day, by
sharing it. We eventually arrive at the measure of the full stature of Christ.
When
Ephesians says we must no more be children, it is saying we need to grow up and
face the unity underlying our lives, the glorious truth of our messy
lives. No more false consciousness or
dualism. No more literalistic
misunderstandings. As Hans Urs Von Balthazar
wrote, a unity of faith might not be possible, but a unity of love is.
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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