Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I’ve never understood why those free Bibles given out by the Gideons were incomplete. If you’ve ever seen one, you may have noticed it. I suppose printing cost keeps them from handing out whole bibles, the Old Testament taking up more than two-thirds of the text as we’ve received it, though it’s a pity since the New Testament can really only be understood in relation to the Old. The really odd thing to me, though, is that these little free bibles almost invariably (at least as far as I can tell) include not only the New Testament but also Psalms and Proverbs. If we’re supposed to understand the New Covenant why not include at least Exodus and Isaiah? The former recounts the revelation of the Old Covenant (the Law) and the latter is perhaps the greatest prophetic precursor to the New Covenant of Grace through Christ.

I guess I can understand the inclusion of the Psalms. Though many are rather nasty complaints asking God to smite one’s enemies, several of them are beautiful poetic prayers of supplication and thanksgiving and can be of great value as we learn to pray as we ought.

But Proverbs?! Forgive me if it sounds like I’m bordering on irreverence or if it’s an important text to some of you, but Proverbs is a rather a dull little book. Its intended audience doesn’t at first glance seem to be very broad. It’s addressed to a young man of wealth and privilege and far too much of it harps on about the dangers of sleeping around. It might have been profitably distributed to the gents in my freshman class at Colgate, mostly East Coast prep school boys who were for the first time surrounded by girls in a less controlled environment than the co-ed mixer with the ladies from the good old sister school two towns over. For most of us the book might seem a bit less apropos.

But while the specific advice which Proverbs offers might leave at least some of us cold, the book shines when its meta-narrative is made explicit. While most of the book pelts us with one pithy piece of advice after another, it occasionally leaves that tack to define wisdom and contrast it with folly in rather striking, beautiful terms. That’s precisely what we get in this morning’s Old Testament lesson and it gives us an important insight not just into how we ought to behave, but into the nature of God.

Listen again to those words we heard a few minutes ago:

Wisdom has built her house,
she has set up her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her beasts, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her maids to call
from the highest places in the town,
“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
To him who is without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Leave simpleness, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.”

Notice that wisdom is not here described as some kind of practical knowledge to be acquired by a lifetime of experience. Wisdom is not described as a brute to be vanquished nor as a race to be won. Wisdom personified is matronly and gracious. She has prepared a meal – a rather elegant one at that! – and sent her handmaids out to invite us into her estate. She is not austere; “leave simpleness” she demands of those who wish to partake of her meal and live.

Unfortunately our lectionary left out the saucy bit, Proverbs’ description of the opposite of wisdom, so here it is and pay attention, because I don’t want to get too explicit in my explication:

[Folly] is noisy;
she is wanton and knows no shame.
She sits at the door of her house,
she takes a seat on the high places of the town,
calling to those who pass by,
who are going straight on their way,
“Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
And to him who is without sense she says,
“Stolen water is sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”
But he does not know that the dead are there,
that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.

Did you catch that? Just like Wisdom, Folly is personified. She is a woman, but of a very different sort. What she has to offer is pleasure of a more vulgar variety. It might initially appear more appealing than Wisdom’s banquet. It seems an awful lot more fun. But it’ll cost you. It’ll cost you upfront and (they knew as well in ancient Israel as we do today) it may well cost an awful lot after the fact. Enough said.

This all seems awfully counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Wisdom is easily acquired and it’s awfully pleasing. You’ve got to go out of your way to be a fool, and it doesn’t take long to experience how unpleasant its fruits can be. If this seems contrary to everything you’ve heard about wisdom and folly, it’s probably because it is. If it doesn’t make much sense, it’s probably because it doesn’t.

If you don’t much like paradoxes… well, sorry folks, that’s Christianity. There are a lot more apparently consistent worldviews out there. Atheism seems remarkably consistent. Too bad it’s false (but, then, I’m biased). Our whole faith is based on apparent inconsistency- “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” as St. Paul put it. Power is shown through condescension, True God becoming a feeble baby born in a filthy shed. Freedom is seen most powerfully in a man bound and brutally murdered by the State. An implement of gruesome pain and terrible shame is our easiest yoke, our lightest burden.

Wisdom, khok-mä, sophia, sapientia, that great illusive virtue, is as easy to take in as air is to breathe, because She is the Word by whom all things were made; because She is Christ Himself. She is as easy to feel as Water from that font. She is as easy to taste as Bread and Wine from that Table. We can try and try and try to gain the Wisdom by which we should order our lives and never find it. We can exhaust our reserves of time and energy and money and esteem and still be foolish and unconsoled. Or we can accept that simple invitation from Matronly Wisdom:

Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!
Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Leave simpleness, and live,
and walk in the way of insight.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

You might have heard the old cliché, “you should disagree without being disagreeable.” It seems like good advice, but perhaps not as strong as it could be, considering how such an approach has been known to lead people into false friendliness and even duplicity, rather than a frank and charitable conversation about differences of opinion.

It seems to me that Paul has something to say about this in today’s epistle? “Putting away all falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors.” Hatefulness, with a saccharin candy-coating of sweetness is not the Christian response to discord, because it doesn’t take into account that, as Christians, “we are members of one another.” We’re in this together, whether we like each other or not. We’re part of the same family, but not just of the same family, but of the same body, and the only way for a body to function is organically, each member in harmony with the other.

And yet, we don’t do this. We are told by the Apostle only to do and say “what is useful for building up [the body]” yet the histories of Church and society are riddled with stories of discord and political intrigue and schism. Things seem to be getting better from an ecclesiastical standpoint, at least insofar as our own branch of Christendom. We’ve gotten better since the culture wars over human sexuality at setting a tone in which faithful people seemed to be able agree to disagree and stay in fellowship. That said, we still have trouble as a society getting over grudges and loving our neighbor, whether we respond aggressively or passive-aggressively. We all have tremendous trouble following Paul’s very practical advice: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”

“Do not leave room for the devil.” There is nothing more diabolical, more devilish, than division in Christ’s Church. That is precisely the work that sin does; it tears brothers and sisters apart from each other, and ultimately it attempts to break apart the very body Christ. We can hide the effects of such evil by being disingenuously sweet to our brother or sister, but that only means that the diabolical program of division is the more insidious.

Now, I have to temper all of this scary stuff with a fact which has been a great encouragement to me and I hope to you who care deeply about the life of the Church. While the story on the national and international levels may be one of division between between political ideologies and religions and races and classes, and while this spirit of divisiveness can and often does infect the church as much as the larger society, I have been so impressed by what I’ve experienced in a handful of congregations I’ve been a part of including this parish. The degree of mutual love and regard with which the members of this parish seem to treat each other is remarkable. The work that we are able to accomplish and the healthiness of our church here is a real gift, it’s more rare than you might think, and it’s largely because there are so many mature people here that seem to genuinely love each other. I don’t think this is a naïve assessment, because I’ve also seen plenty of churches with profound dysfunction. Of course, no group of fallible people is without its internal squabbles, and my spectacles aren’t so rose-tinted that I don’t recognize where some of those are, even among us. Even so, I feel truly blessed to be a part of a congregation that has in many ways already learned to “put away falsehood”, to “be angry but not sin”, to “live in love as Christ loved us.” In a world where people can’t seem to conscientiously disagree with each other but retain mutual respect and appreciation of each other, the church has, believe it or not, been doing a better job of modeling Christian unity to the larger culture than it has in past years and that we can be the most powerful witness of reconciliation in the world precisely because of our disagreements.

But if I just said “keep up the good work”, that would not be a very compelling charge with which to end a sermon, and it wouldn’t be entirely honest, because each of us has moments in which we need to work at truly loving our neighbor. Many of us have trouble with anger, and do let the sun set on it. Paul said “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you,” but O how much more easily is this said than done. C.S. Lewis said that the way to get there, to start truly loving one’s neighbor, is to act as if one does.

It seems to me that the solution is more difficult and requires more reflection, though. I think we need to meditate more carefully and more intentionally on the fact that we have all been baptized into one body, that we are all one family whether we like it or not. Just like a family, our life together as fellow Christians means that we get close enough to see each others’ blemishes; but just like a family we are called to recognize that God has put us all together for a reason. God has thrown us together because God is known in relationship.

In fact, in a sense, God is relationship. God is not a lone person, but three persons living in unity. And even though God has a profound, mystical relationship within the Godhead, God has expanded his love such that we can be in relationship with him too. And even more than that, God has given us gifts like the Sacrament of Marriage so that two people can create a community of love like that between the persons of the Godhead. And even more than that, God has given us the Church, so that all people everywhere may have the opportunity to live in that same love.

Ultimately, the Church is not a tool for self-improvement, but a means by which God’s love can be shared. It is a gift, and like any gift it must be cherished. And in recognizing what a great gift it is, I think we can ultimately come to realize our own responsibility in nurturing the life of the Church by truly, genuinely loving each of our brothers and sisters and then leading lives which express that love. In doing so, Paul tells, we become “imitators of God”. God is love, and a godly life is one lived in love. In doing so, in becoming more grateful, faithful, loving people we may like Christ himself, present our own lives as “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So, those of you who were here last week will remember that I left you with a teaser. I know how frustrating that can be. So, as promised, here is part the second.

But first, a reminder of the ground we covered last week. A large crowd had just been fed by Jesus and decided they wanted to make him king and would do it by force if need be. They had misunderstood the message Jesus intended to communicate by feeding them. Instead of promising to feed people with regular old bread as their earthly king, Jesus meant to communicate that as the King of Heaven he would provide heavenly food, spiritual sustenance, to all who would believe in him. The difficulty the crowd had—and that we have—is in seeing past our immediate temporal concerns in order to focus on enduring spiritual matters; and the question I left you with was about how we might attain the sort of focus and vision which permits us to see things through the lens of eternity.

So that’s where we are, and that’s obviously where the crowd remained at the beginning of today’s Gospel. “Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus addressed them, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” And then he gives them the same charge I mentioned last week: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” In other words, try to see past your immediate concerns to that which will sustain you forever.

Now, when we think about someone who we might think has achieved this shift in focus, this appreciation of things eternal, we might be tempted to envision a caricature, and think that this is the ideal, an ideal we’ll never reach. I envision some old monk living as a hermit, totally detached from the world, spending twenty-four hours a day meditating on the divine mysteries. In fact, this caricature does not have a solid touchstone in the Christian tradition, because even those few who become hermits do so after spending years in a community with other monks, and they still rejoin that community regularly for Mass.

In any event, it does not seem to me that this is the proper method for focusing on enduring, heavenly things (at least for the vast majority of us) and I don’t think that this is what Jesus is getting at. The Christian worldview is not world-denying or body-denying. It does not reject the physical world as something we have to get beyond so that we can float about in a disinterested state. Rather we are saved in the world, and it is through our ordinary, physical, contingent existence that we find the sustaining savour of heavenly, spiritual, enduring things.

And there is one gift which we are given in the midst of this old world which more than anything under the sun accomplishes this shift in focus, and ultimately the transformation of our whole lives, that we might be a holy people. And it is found in ordinary, physical, contingent stuff. Bread and Wine. Nothing can be more common, more ordinary. On their own, just plain bread and wine sustain us and gladden our hearts. But when we raise them up before God the Father, when we give thanks for them and for the gift of His Son’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, they gain a whole new power to sustain and gladden in a very different way. They become the Body and Blood of Christ—not just in a manner of speaking, but truly—and they give us a taste, quite literally, of all that matters, of all that endures.

We have many gifts from God, many things for which to be thankful, some of them miraculous. The children of Israel were miraculously given manna in the wilderness, but in today’s Gospel Jesus said it gets even better than that. Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus puts it even more bluntly: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die.” Though the children of Israel ought to have been thankful for the manna, though we must remember to be thankful for all the gifts, small and great, which we receive from the beneficent hand of our Lord, the gift for which we may be most thankful is the gift of the Eucharist, for its power to sustain is eternal.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” When I administer Communion and say “the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in everlasting life” I’m not using a complex metaphor. I think most of you know that I’m not opposed to complexity or metaphors. I’m not a literal thinker or a fundamentalist by any stretch of the imagination. But on this matter, I’m being pretty direct, because I think it’s a matter on which Jesus was being pretty direct and the Church throughout its long history has until fairly recently been pretty consistent in affirming that. And of course, you’re welcome to disagree and I’m sure we can maintain the fellowship of enjoined on us by Christ in spite of it. Anyway, when I say it’s the Body of Christ, it’s because I think it is (and, of course, because that’s what the prayerbook says to say it), and when I say “keep you in everlasting life” it’s because I live in the hope that the sustenance we gain from regular reception of the Holy Communion really does have the power to preserve us, Body and Soul, into eternity.

But in addition to its mystical power to sustain, the Eucharist, if we will receive it worthily and mindfully, does succeed in refocusing our attention to heavenly things, to things which endure. This is because in eating the Bread and drinking the Wine we are partaking in the heavenly banquet. As one friend of mine put it, probably more verbosely than he needed to do, “at the altar, we receive a foretaste of the eschatological convivium.” For all the wordiness of that phrase, it simply means that in the midst of this life we are given a taste of the life of the world to come every time we eat this Bread and drink this Wine. If we are attentive to this fact, I strongly believe that our weekly or even more frequent reception of the Eucharist will help us to “pass through things temporal so that we lose not the things eternal” as last week’s collect put it. So, may we all be thankful for Christ’s greatest gift to the Church, the Eucharist, and may we be as eager to receive of its benefits as the crowd that day on the shore of Galilee who said “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Let us pray.
Soul of Christ, sanctify us
Body of Christ, save us
Blood of Christ, inebriate us
Water from Christ’s side, wash us
Passion of Christ, strengthen us
O good Jesus, hear us
Within Thy wounds hide us
Suffer us not to be separated from Thee
From the malicious enemy defend us
In the hour of our death call us
And bid us come unto Thee
That we may praise Thee with Thy saints
and with Thy angels
Forever and ever
Amen.