The Language of Heaven
Proper 13B
4 August 2034; 9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
Grants Pass, 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.
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 meeting with me. I replied, “There must be some mistake. He really wanted to talk.” 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. And it’s not just me with such experiences. The guy who taught me Arabic decades ago loved to tell the story of how, when visiting Mexico after just 2 years of High School Spanish, he saw a sign on a roadside shop “LECHERIA” and was so disappointed that was a dairy rather than a house of ill repute! It sold nothing to do with lechery, but rather leche, milk.
Learning a new language means you will make mistakes. You will misunderstand and be misunderstood.
Jesus in the Christian Testament 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. Similarly, Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures 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, venturing onto that turf means on occasion totally misunderstanding things.
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 becomes 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, participates in, and brings about. John is saying, “If you take things too literally, you’ll miss the real point.”
We are in that period of summer called by some clerical wags "Bread-tide," since we have several weeks of eucharistic gospels all about the Eucharist and the Bread from Heaven. 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 running 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 male, as a divine child abuser who needed to torture and kill his child so that his “wrath” might be calmed, his offended honor “satisfied.” This monster demands blood to expiate sin, not the blood of the sinner, but that anyone, it appears.
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. 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.
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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