Sermons

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

A political consultant once told his potential “client” that one of the best ways to get elected was to speak in vague generalities which over-promise what his constituents would gain should he hold office because “broken promises are often lost in a cloud of changing circumstances so that anger against you will be minimal.” In other words, promise to make all the wildest dreams of the electorate come true, even if it’s highly unlikely, because they’ll forget and at least you’ll still be in power. Lest you think this bit of cynical wisdom can be attributed to a modern, American political wag, these are in fact the words of Cicero, written in 64 B.C. Things haven’t changed much. If someone is doing a great deal of good and meeting people’s needs and garnering favour with a broad audience, we sometimes tend to assume that he or she is planning on running for some kind of powerful, political position. It’s a cynical assumption, but we nonetheless often think in those terms, and are pretty regularly correct.

This is precisely the pattern into which the crowd in today’s Gospel fell. I have heard colleagues complain about the fact that our lectionary makes us talk about bread for five weeks in a row, today being the first. How appropriate, though, considering another Roman two centuries after Cicero, Juvenal taught us that the best way for a leader to gain or retain authority was through “bread and circuses.” Jesus seemed in this morning’s Gospel like he was going to make all their social and political dreams come true. He fed a huge group of hungry people, and that’s precisely what the Israelites of the first century wanted in a political ruler. They had grown used to Roman rule with a Jewish figurehead, Herod, receiving plenty from the largesse of the empire in exchange for keeping the peace. Rarely did this largesse devolve much lower than the top tier of the Temple elite. The vast majority of Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be a new king, who would overthrow the Roman Empire, dispel political and religious corruption, and reëstablish Israel as an independent, wealthy nation where everyone could be safe and well-fed and brought out of the depths of poverty.

So, when Jesus fed the five thousand, this is immediately where the collective mind of the assembled crowd went. “Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king.” Israel, you might recall, had had a rough go with it as far as kings were concerned. At the establishment of the monarchy they pressured the prophet Samuel into permitting them to have a king despite God’s wish that they not have such a government. This commenced centuries of mostly bad kings who fell into moral laxity and religious unfaithfulness, up to the puppet kings of the Roman period. Slow to learn from this inglorious history, the Israelites were going to try again to make all things right by putting another politician in charge. Here was another person whom they thought would make all their wildest dreams come true.

Now Jesus could have permitted the crowd to have their way. He could have given into the kind of pride which had led others in his own day to mount attempts at gaining political control, and if he had done so he likely would have been more successful than those others, all of whom were savagely executed by the Romans. That Christ did not sin does not mean that he did not face temptation, after all.

Thank God that he did not. Thank God that instead Christ chose the path of suffering and of death which won for us the victory over sin. What Jesus realized, and what his crowd did not, was that his Kingdom was not of this world.

Something that’s really neat about the Gospel of John (which I’ve mentioned before) is that every time Jesus does something it is a sign of his identity and mission. There are two words in the New Testament that get translated as miracle, the most common of which id dynamis which simply means “a deed of power”. But in John’s Gospel, every time Jesus performs what we would call a “miracle” the word John uses is seimon which means “sign”. So, every time Jesus performs an act like he did in today’s Gospel, it’s meant to be a “sign” of who Jesus is and what he’s about.

Unfortunately, sometimes people misread the sign, or rather they can see the sign but not get the message. It is as if someone who couldn’t read saw a stop sign and thought that it simply meant “red octagons ahead”. This is what happened that day on the Sea of Galilee. The people recognized that Jesus was divulging something about himself in feeding them, they knew it was a sign, but they got the wrong message. Jesus wasn’t showing them that he could continue to give them regular old bread and fish if he were made king. He wasn’t trying to communicate that he would make all their political and physical dreams come true. Rather, he was communicating something about the tremendous power he had and has to give spiritual sustenance.

There is a danger here of getting ahead of ourselves, because next week’s Gospel reading deals with the real meaning of the sign; the enduring sustenance of which it foretells, the eating of which keeps us in eternal life, is nothing less than the Eucharist. But that is for next week’s sermon.

For now, let me leave you with a little food for thought, pun intended. The crowd believed that physical food, the bread which Jesus gave them, was a sign of generous governance in an earthly kingdom. They did not have the ability to see beyond their very tangible problems, penury and hunger being chief among them, and we can hardly blame them for that. How often, though, do we fail to see beyond the exigencies of our earthly strife to that which endure. How often do we not pray the prayer of today’s collect, that “we may so pass through things temporal, that we not lose the things eternal”? How often do we place our ultimate hope on that raise, or that benefit from the state, or whatever instead of placing our hope on the Risen Lord? I don’t mean to suggest that the “cares and occupations of this life” are not often real problems we need to deal with and pray about and seek to address as the body of Christ, and that sometimes the state may indeed play a role in, but all too often we see our salvation as being in the resolution of these issues and not in the abiding love and grace of God. The question is, what does any of us really want? Do we principally want an earthly king to fix all our immediate problems or the King of Heaven to lead the whole of creation to its consummation in Himself? Does any of us really want for nothing but earthly bread, or do we crave also the bread of heaven? If the answer is the latter, how do we fix our minds on things heavenly? How do we see beyond our immediate problems to ultimate concerns? How can we so pass through things temporal so as not to lose sight if things eternal?

+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.

I’ve increasingly thought that I need to take a break from social media, and one of the reasons is that I get riled up by “hot takes” and the reduction of complicated issues to “memes.” I suppose something like this problem has been around for longer than Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and the like; we used to call them “soundbites.” These oversimplified propositions and slogans do seem to propagate so much more quickly online, though. The one that irked me this last week though was a quote from the Franciscan priest and popular writer about spirituality, Richard Rohr. Fr. Rohr has a big following, and I’m sure he’s a good, well-meaning man, but I’ve just never been a fan of his work. (Admitting that publicly in some circles is like saying you don’t like motherhood and apple pie, so I try not to rag on the man very often.)

Anyway, the “soundbite” that’s been circulating recently online, over a photo of Rohr, is his quote “Jesus never said ‘worship me’, but he often said ‘follow me.’” Now, this may be technically true, it gives the wrong impression of our Lord, who made it perfectly clear for those who would reflect on the whole of his words recorded in the Gospels that he revealed himself to be the eternal Son of God the Father, the second person of the Trinity, and thus is only fitting that he should receive our heartfelt worship.

I think this matters a great deal, because the impression one gets from this “meme theology” is that our emulation of Jesus’ morality, not our reliance on the love of God in Christ, is what saves us. In other words, you better earn your way into heaven by good works. I know I’m a broken record on this score, but the one thing I’ll never be ashamed of repeating ad nauseam is this one point. The Law kills and the Gospel saves. We can and should try to be better, to follow Jesus’ perfect moral example, but if that’s where our trust lies, we are in trouble, because none of us is really all that great at being good.

I say all of this to try to make some sense of a tension which is present in today’s Gospel. We learned that Jesus and the disciples didn’t even have time to eat because they were so busy with sick, hungry, needy people. So, they try to get away and have a time of respite by crossing the Sea of Galilee and getting away from the crowds. But when they get to the other side, the people there recognized who Jesus and his disciples were and rushed up with their own needs just as they had on the other side of the lake. The Gospel doesn’t say that Jesus and his disciples had a cup of tea and took a nap before getting on with it, and we can only assume that they continued their ministry as before. Tired and hungry, they tended to others who were tired and hungry without tending to their own needs. “What would Jesus do?” He’d sacrifice his time of respite whenever the any need presented itself.

Jesus could do this, and some heroic saints like the apostles did it as well, at least for a time, but for most of us such a schedule would lead to ineffectiveness at best and resentment at worst, our attempt at perfection ironically making us even less morally commendable. I would not be able to do the needful tasks set before me in my ministry if I didn’t eat at relatively normal times, and sleep relatively regular hours, and take time simply to be alone and pray in the presence of God. If I didn’t take time to do these things, I’d eventually get cranky and the work that I do for the church would be slapdash and inconsistent.

The same would be true for any of you, unless there is a real certifiable “capital ‘S’” Saint in the congregation this morning. Most of us would be sorely remiss if we didn’t take time to recharge our batteries, as it were, and God not only understands but insists on this.

We heard it in the psalm, which many of us know better in the King James translation:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul.

Rest and restoration is something God intends for us, and which He gives us. We usually hear this psalm at funerals, and indeed death is the final means by which we attain rest and rejuvenation, albeit in eager expectation of the Resurrection. But this is not primarily a psalm about death. It is, rather, a psalm about life, the Christian life wherein we find periods of rest in God between the periods in which we furiously wage the glorious battle for the Kingdom.

Thus, the Christian life is one of balance. We are certainly not permitted to live a life of sloth and complete comfort. But neither does the Christian life entail that we labor for the Kingdom to the point of exhaustion and, to use a hopelessly contemporary term, “burnout”.

Yet our whole culture militates against this balance. Or, rather, I should say cultures, because there are, it seems to me, two diametrically opposed views of human activity to which significant portions of our society adhere, both of which miss the mark.

On the one hand, we have the “Protestant Work Ethic” a heresy which defined the American psyche for generations. In a nutshell, this worldview holds that we’ll stay out of trouble if we keep extraordinarily busy. We’re less prone to sins of the flesh if we work eighteen hours a day and sleep lightly the other six.

On the other hand, we have the hedonist approach, which has taken hold of much of society in the last fifty years or so. By hedonist I don’t necessarily mean sexual hedonism, though that fits under the umbrella, as it were. The technical meaning of hedonism is the glorification of any lifestyle predicated principally on self-gratification, whether vulgar or apparently lofty. So, sitting in a bathtub all day eating donuts and drinking cognac is one form of hedonism, and doing nothing with one’s life besides personally enriching leisure activities like reading dusty books and exercising is another form of hedonism.

Anyway, the “Protestant Work Ethic” and hedonism are two sides of the same heretical coin. Like so many heresies, the Christian view is found in the via media, the middle way. Just as the old Christological heresies, which held that Christ was either only God or only man, were resolved by a middle way of affirming both truths, so too do these modern heresies find their orthodoxy somewhere in the middle. We must come to balance work and play to be healthy people, and we must balance the good works enjoined by our Christian commitment with prayer and rest to be healthy Christians. Christian monasticism has struck this balance perfectly in its programmatic scheduling of time for work, prayer, and study; but we who live in the world can find this balance too if we make a prayerful assessment of our own lives, and develop what is called a rule of life: a plan for how to balance work and play and prayer and study and so forth.

In the end, we may be sure that the Christian life is one in which activity and contemplation both play a role. The Christian life requires rest if the work we are to do is to be done. Ultimately this rest is found in God and our times of recreation (or re-creation) are sanctified by God and held in His hands. Indeed, to rest at all is to rest in God in a profound and wonderful way. And so, let us ever pray the prayer of St. Augustine, who said, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they find their rest in thee.”

+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.

Today’s Old Testament lesson came from the relatively short book of the Prophet Amos, which, along with the other so-called “lesser prophets”, gets a great deal less air time, as it were, than the more lengthy prophetic books like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In some cases this might be because the latter include more prophecies which we believe to have been accomplished or reinforced in the New Testament. Amos’ prophecy was a great deal more immediate. He predicted an earthquake and it happened about two years later.

Even so, there is much we can learn from this little book. Amos was probably the first prophet to have his prophecies written down. Biblical scholars have become surprisingly good at dating these things, and we are pretty sure that today’s Old Testament lesson was from a vision Amos had and preached about sometime between the autumn of 750 BC and that of 749 BC. In this sense, Amos would have been the first Old Testament prophet, an appropriate bookend to the figure usually reckoned the final prophet, John the Baptist, of whose demise we heard about in today’s Gospel.

Anyway, as the first prophet with a book, Amos set a program which other prophets would adopt, and this is specifically the practice of denouncing the unrighteousness of Israel. As the chosen people, the children of Israel would have been used to hearing prophets’ denunciations of their neighbors and approbations of Israel.

Now, Amos begins his prophecies in a manner which his contemporaries would have recognized. For the first two chapters of the book, we may read of the Lord’s wrath against the Edomites and the Moabites and the Philistines and so forth, and for about the first ten minutes of his sermon, Amos’ audience would have been quite comfortable. These were the familiar old denunciations which jingoistic pseudo-prophets would have given them before, and which would have served as pabulum for a people very much set in their ways.

But then would come the bit Amos’ audience wasn’t expecting. “Hear this word that the Lord has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up out of the land of Egypt.” He had sounded so much like all the other prophets, his audience must have thought, and then he had to go and kick over the ant hill. He had to denounce Israel! It is little wonder that at the end of today’s reading, Amos is told in no uncertain terms that he had better just head back to the farm, away from God’s own native Israel. Perhaps a better end than John, who we learned was beheaded for much the same thing, but still a disappointing reception.

Amos’ audience must have been furious, because what he was doing was saying that the chosen people had the same sins as the Gentiles, that they were just as guilty and that, in a sense, they had lost their special status. They had become just like the pagan people who surrounded them, and thus were no better.

And what were the sins of Israel which made this the case? They were both moral and religious. On the one hand, though the birthright of the Israelites was a strong moral code which protected the helpless and the outsider, the people had begun to “oppress the poor” and “crush the needy”. They had become both greedy and, Amos pointed out, lazy.

But in addition to this moral bankruptcy, the Israelites had become religiously unfaithful. This is just under the surface of today’s reading, the story of the plumb line. God was to level out the land of Israel in a manner they might have found counterintuitive. God said, “the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste.” These were places which were erected to the glory of God, and in the time of Amos they had not been universally replaced by the Jerusalem temple as the locus of sacrifice, and thus they remained important places of prayer and devotion.

In fact, the places where Israel worshipped provided an all-too-simple means whereby they could overlook their own iniquity. This is a form of hypocrisy we might have noticed even today, and which from time to time I’ve noticed in myself. Now I’m the first to admit that religion is an important, powerful thing. It connects us to God. I’m not at all suggesting that being “spiritual but not religious”, as many contemporary people would say they are is preferable, and I personally don’t see how that’s ultimately tenable (but that’s the topic for another sermon). What I do mean to say is that sometimes our religion can be perverted to the point where it either justifies everything we’re already doing or it gives us an excuse to go out and be nasty people and still be self-righteous about going to church a lot. This was the point God was making through Amos by saying that he’d knock down all their temples. It was the point that a later prophet, Hosea, made even more explicitly when the Lord told him, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.”

The prophets can get polemical and make their points in shocking ways, and a fulsome appreciation of prophetic literature as a whole suggests that sacrifice and worship were not seen as unbeneficial or any less necessary than they had been. Rather, the point is that without faithfulness to the moral laws of the Old Testament, the Israelites could not render an acceptable sacrifice. The “high places and sanctuaries” and even the Jerusalem temple were built in vain. The Christian analogue to this is that if we’re not prepared to live a life informed by the virtues, we’re not making it better by showing up at church. Both virtue and religion, both moral commitment and worship, must be held together. This was the point Amos was making and Hosea and even John the Baptist who, we may recall, referred to the religious authorities of his day as a “brood of vipers”.

As Christians we have a benefit, however, in that our worship life informs our moral life and gives it shape. I don’t just mean that my musings from the pulpit can occasionally encourage good behaviour, though I hope from time to time I might succeed in doing so. No, our whole liturgical life is constructed in such a way that faithfulness in worship can help make us better Christians. We are exposed not only to theological truths but to moral teaching by our extensive use of scripture in worship. But even more than that, and in a way we cannot possibly understand or quantify, our regular, faithful reception of the Holy Communion slowly, mystically transforms us into the kind of people God intends us to be. Christ is not just made known to us symbolically in the breaking of the bread; he literally comes to dwell in us when we receive his Body. Thus, we truly do take these Holy Mysteries to our own health and salvation if we do so aright. We take them to the end of being transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and conformed to the very body of Christ.

This takes some of the pressure off, because it means that it’s not all about what we do. It’s what God does in us. Yet we must remain open to the ways in which Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament is at work transforming us, or we can easily slip back into the hypocrisy and empty religiosity which Amos preached against. So, when you approach the altar this morning, and from now on, I encourage you to consider how the Sacrament is at work in your own transformation, how it is that it strengthens you to live in accordance with the virtues, and even how you might have stood in the way of that transformational work. In the end, the strength we need to be the kind of people God intends us to be is available at this very altar, and it is simply ours to be open to its power to change us.

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