August 23, Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18, John 6:56-69

Kristin White

Joshua is going to die, soon. In today’s first reading he stands before the people whom he has served, first with Moses, and now on his own. These are the People Israel, a people he has loved and led. He has claimed this Land of Promise with and for them, the land they wandered 40 years to find, the land they had heard about for generations all the way back to Abraham. Now, it’s all true for this people. The promises are fulfilled. Now, they drink from wells that they did not dig. Now, they eat the fruit of trees they did not plant. And now, Joshua’s life draws near its end. He calls the people together at Schechem, the center of that Promised Land. He reminds them of all that God has done. And he says this: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Choose. The gods of your ancestors? The gods of the strangers in whose land you now live? Or the LORD: the God of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, the God of Isaac and Rebecca, the God of Jacob and Leah and Rachel…the God of promise, fulfilled. Choose. Choose this day who it is that you will serve.

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Jesus stands in the synagogue at Capernaum, in today’s gospel. He talks about bread and wine and flesh and blood and the father sending him and who will live forever. “This teaching is difficult,” his followers say. “Who can accept it?” Pay attention here to who is named in this gospel: John doesn’t call them Jews or Gentiles or Pharisees or scribes or crowds or regular old people. He calls them disciples. These are people who have declared their colors, named Jesus as their leader. These are people who have given something up in order to go where he goes, to listen to what he teaches. They’re his people. Or at least they thought they were…and he thought they were, too. Until now. So they complain among themselves about this crazy teaching of his. And Jesus, being who he is, doesn’t soften things for them, doesn’t make it easier for them to stick with him. No. He makes it more difficult. “Oh!” he says. “Does this offend you?!” And he makes it even harder, with talk about how people must come to him, and how they must not…with talk about who will have eternal life, and who will not. And that’s…kind of…it…for these followers. The ones who were complaining are now the ones who are packing it in, deciding “not to go about with him” now, returning instead to what they think was, to what they think is not so difficult, to what they think they can accept. “And what about you?” Jesus asks those who remain. We know the twelve are there, we don’t know how many – or if any – others have stayed. Can you see them in this exchange? Avoiding eye contact with him, watching the others gather their stuff and go, kicking the dirt around in circles with a sandaled foot. “What about you? Are you going, too?” Jesus asks them.

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“Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua challenges the People Israel at Schechem.

“Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks his friends at the synagogue at Capernaum.

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It’s the fifth week, now, the fifth of five Sundays in the Bread of Life discourse. Congratulations, people of St. Augustine’s. You’ve made it. We’ve made it, through five weeks of Jesus saying to those who follow him: “I am the bread of life,” “I AM the bread of life,” “I am the BREAD of life,” “I am the bread OF life,” and, finally, today: “I am the bread of LIFE.” By the end of today’s service we will have sung every hymn I know of about bread. We will have had our fill, like those 5000 besides women and children who sat down on a great deal of grass to watch Jesus bless and break what was five loaves. We will have had enough bread, already. And more than enough, perhaps.

Here’s the thing, though. I wonder if, as your preacher for several of these weeks, I missed an important point before now. Because in those others sermons I talked a lot about the “bread” part. But I’m not sure I paid sufficient attention to the “of life” half of the equation. And isn’t that really the heart of it, the point of the whole thing? Jesus says: “I come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.” At the very earliest moments of creation, God takes a handful of dirt, shapes it into a person, and breathes sacred life into Adam’s mouth.

So today we have two passages from scripture from that other half, the “of life” part of the statement over these past weeks, passages challenging the people to choose…life. They can choose those other gods – the gods their ancestors worshiped, the gods of strangers in foreign lands now claimed – or they can choose to worship the God who has fulfilled promises, promises that nurture their lives as people and as a People. They can choose to remain steadfast in the midst of teachings that are difficult, things that are hard to accept, or they can turn back with the others, stop going about with the leader who teaches such things.

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Jimmy Carter is teaching Sunday School today at Maranantha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia. I was five years old at the time that he took office as President. And I don’t know much about his politics, beyond what’s on the list of historic events of the late 1970s. And anyway, politics are not why I bring him up. The reason I bring his name into this space is because he served as an illustration to me about what it means to choose whom you will serve, and to live that choice.

The former president gave a press conference this week, as many of you probably saw. He had surgery in recent days to remove a tumor from his liver. Tests and a scan later revealed that the cancer was melanoma, that in fact the doctors had not gotten it all, that there are four small spots on his brain, that it’s likely to be found in other places in his body as well. Later on the day of the press conference, President Carter would have the first in a series of radiation treatments aimed at shrinking the cancer, at slowing its progress.

If ever somebody had an excuse to say, “This is difficult! Who can accept it?!” and pull the covers up over his head, he does. Instead, Jimmy Carter spoke as somebody who knows in his bones that life is short, that we do not have too much time. He talked about what a good life he has had. He said that marrying his wife, Rosalynn, to whom he has been married for almost 70 years, is the greatest thing he has done in this life. He talked about his hope that Guinea Worm, an awful disease that he has worked through the Carter Center to eradicate, would be gone before he is. He said he hopes to make one more trip to build houses for people who need them, this time in Nepal. And he’s teaching Sunday School today in Plains, Georgia, perhaps right now, at Maranantha Baptist Church.

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“Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua tells the people as his own life draws to a close.

“Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks those who have followed him.

“Choose,” the scripture tells us. Choose what you will serve, and whom. And yes – choose, knowing that things are difficult, they’re hard to accept, and that some will turn away…understandably.

Isn’t that what is set before us every day? Choose whom you will serve. Choose if you will be kind to someone who maybe doesn’t deserve it. Choose to fulfill your promise to come home at the end of the day, instead of putting in an understandable couple more hours at the office. Choose to pick up the phone and talk to someone you love but have been avoiding. Choose to spend your money in ways consistent with who you want to be. Choose to pray. Choose to take on the hard work of reconciling what has been broken, and see your own fingerprints in the breaking. And do that now, instead of assuming there will be a chance for it in some distant future. (Life is short. We do not have too much time…)

We have chances throughout our days to make choices that, together over days and weeks and years and decades, shape who we are. “Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua says. “As for me, as for my household, we will serve the LORD.”

In the end, the twelve stay with him. Yes, Jesus’ teachings are difficult, hard to accept. And maybe there’s a part of each of them that does wish to go away also, with the others. But in the end, at least for now, the twelve stay. Not because they’re smarter or stronger or even more faithful. They stay with him because they have chosen.

“Do you wish to go away also?” Jesus asks them.

“Where are we to go?” Peter responds. “You have the words of eternal life.”

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(Life is short, and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those we travel with. So be swift to love. Make haste to be kind. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be with you and remain with you always. Amen.)

August 16, Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

John 6:51-58

Kristin White

           Bread is the substance of possibility.

           In the stories of the Bible, stories of who we are and who we have been, bread is the thing that makes a difference, the thing that transforms, at moments of oblivion or exhaustion or confusion or despair.

            Early in the book of Genesis, bread means hospitality. Abram and Sarai welcome three guests who arrive in the heat of the day to join them in their home at their table, to eat the bread that Sarai prepares. How are they to know that these three mysterious guests might just be the three persons of the Trinity? How are they to know that God will call Abram from there to a land he does not know, lead him out under a sky full of stars and promise more descendants than he can count? Would it all have happened, without that bread at their table in the heat of the day?

            Bread means freedom to the People Israel as they wander in the wilderness, a people becoming a people, a people afraid of all they’ve left behind and afraid of all that lies ahead of them, afraid of everything they do not know. These are stiff-necked people, scripture tells us. And maybe they are. I think they’re terrified, which is never a condition for people to be at their best. And at the moment when they are most fearful, crying out for what they think they used to know, God gives them what they need. God rains down manna from heaven. “So mortals ate the bread of angels,” the psalm tells us. “God provided food enough.”

            Bread means perseverance to a prophet on the run in the person of Elijah. Convinced that his life is over, he finds a place to rest. He sleeps and wakes at the hand of an angel who encourages him to eat the bread prepared for him. And again, it happens, he sleeps and wakes and eats more bread. So instead of dying, the angel nourishes Elijah for the journey that lies ahead of him. With bread. And more bread.

            Bread means community to the 5000 people, besides women and children, who dare to follow Jesus to the far side of the Sea of Galilee, and on up a mountain (just for good measure). There, as they sit on the great deal of grass in that place, five loaves become much more than five loaves for those who have followed Jesus. Five loaves, transformed, means that those 5000 people besides women and children don’t have to fracture themselves off and go find their own food at the end of the day. Instead, those 5000 and more eat together, as a body. The transformation of what will be their food becomes their own transformation, as well. Everybody eats and is satisfied. Everybody has enough.

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          Today marks the fourth Sunday of five in what Bible scholars refer to as the Bread of Life Discourse from the Gospel of John. What that means, in non-Bible-scholar language, is that for these five weeks (stay tuned, there’s one more left next week), Jesus says to his followers: “I am the bread of life.” He says it over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. I will confess that some preachers…this one among them…have (ahem) hungered, on occasion, after something else to talk about, something else to preach about, something new to say in the midst of this sustained message. There’s quite a lot of bread to be had, here.

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            I’m grateful to serve a church - the Episcopal Church broadly, and St. Augustine’s in particular – which values our minds, which trusts that God feeds our intellect and imagination. I love deep theological discourse, I love wondering together about who God is and who we are and what we are called to do and to be in this place and time. And I love the fact that we gather every week as a people in a wide-ranging, very big theological tent of understanding about what it is we’re doing here at the Eucharist.

            There are people at St. Augustine’s who hear the words about Jesus’ body and blood in today’s Gospel and in the words of the Communion Prayer and believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ blessed and broken and given from this table. And there are people here who are a little weirded out, honestly, by the language of the Gospel and the words of the prayer, but who think the Eucharist is a lovely ritual of remembrance. There are people here who don’t know what to think, but who have entrusted themselves to this community of faith. And there are very small people here who have received the sacrament for as long as they have known, whose theology would be both simple and profound if they were to share it with us (“Hey! I know this place,” Anderson Broxson said to me when he was four years old…”This is where we have the feast!”).

           And I love the fact that we gather here every Sunday to do one of the least abstract, most basic things that we know how to do. We eat. We reach forward with empty hands, receive the bread, and eat it. And I have to believe in that moment that the fact of what we are doing matters a great deal more than how we might interpret that act. I have to believe, in that moment, that the words of Augustine’s sermon on the Eucharist resonate through the years: we become what we see, we receive who we are. The bread of life. The substance of possibility.

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            Many of you know that I have Celiac Disease, which means I can’t eat anything that contains wheat. So I have to say, it’s kind of a funny thing to be preaching about this whole Bread of Life Discourse, as someone who can’t eat bread in its most common form.

            I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease in 2004. At the time, I didn’t know anything about gluten-free wafers. So first I tried breaking off tinier and tinier pieces of the host for communion. But it didn’t work. I still got sick. So, finally, I stopped receiving for a while. I told myself that it was okay, that I was there within my community, that participating in the sacrament was itself a sacrament. I would receive the wine, was even told that receiving in one kind was the same as receiving both. I’ve been an Episcopalian my whole life. And for the first time that I could remember in my life, I couldn’t put forward my own hands and receive that bread, that substance of possibility. I couldn’t receive the Body as a member of the Body, becoming the Body.

            I track the theology of it all, in the abstract. I understand the arguments of accidents. And what I can tell you is that I remember the day my priest found gluten-free hosts for me to receive. I can tell you that it was not an abstract experience. It was visceral, and whole. And holy. And I remember.

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            Throughout our story as a people, bread is the substance of possibility. It’s the thing that transforms from oblivion and exhaustion and confusion and despair, into hospitality and freedom, into the thing that nurtures a new community. And I have to wonder, in all this talk about bread, if we can take Augustine’s words in their most visceral and elemental way. I have to wonder if, as we eat from what might have been five loaves to begin with, we, like they, become so much more. I have to wonder if we become the bread of life for a world that starves for it, if perhaps we become the substance of possibility.

August 9, Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

1 Kings 19:4-8; John 6:35, 41-51

Bryan Cones

Poor Elijah must really have been having a bad day.

It’s hard to tell from this short passage what has been going so poorly for this great hero and prophet that he is ready to curl up and die. It might be helpful to remember that we are joining Elijah in the middle of his story. This part of his story started with a great contest between Elijah, the prophet of the God of Israel, and the prophets of the Canaanite God Baal, imported by King Ahab of Israel along with his Canaanite wife, Jezebel, who incidentally gets all the blame for the king’s behavior. The contest ends with a victory for Elijah, in which God sends fire from heaven in answer to his prayer. To the victor go the spoils, so Elijah then kills all 400 of those Canaanite prophets—he was a warrior prophet after all—and the king and his queen are understandably angry and so have been pursuing Elijah, which is how we find him under the broom tree.

Elijah is running away, and with good reason. He’s probably a bit angry with God, too, since he is suffering for doing what God told him to do. He’s at the end of his rope, and he’s ready to throw in the towel.

How you ever felt like Elijah? Have you ever felt like running away? Maybe you did. Did you ever get angry when what you felt like was the right thing to do blows up in your face, or when you had to face the consequences of something you have done? Maybe you know what it’s like to be angry with God. Maybe you’ve also been ready to throw in the towel, like Elijah. What was that like for you?

Which brings us to today’s story: Instead of letting Elijah die, God sends a rescue mission. There is an angel and miraculous food: bread and water, enough for a 40-day hike. God still has plans for Elijah; there is more to his journey. And so Elijah gets up and goes on his way, knowing more or less where he was going—but maybe not what for.

Have you ever experienced your own angelic intervention, your own messenger from God to encourage you? Maybe someone knew just what to say at just the right time. What has sustained you in your own wilderness times? Maybe you have discovered strength to get up and carry on, even knowing that there was still a long road ahead. What was that like for you?

There is an end of a sort to Elijah’s story: He arrives at Mount Horeb, where he experiences God in a most unexpected way: not in a great wind, not in an earthquake, not in a fire, but in the sound of sheer silence. And in that experience God reveals to Elijah the prophet’s purpose, and gives Elijah his marching orders for his work. It’s a turning point for Elijah—a new moment of clarity.

Have you had a moment like that, when things finally make sense, or you begin to see more clearly the road you have been traveling or even the purpose of your journey? Maybe you had your own silent moment with God, when you realized you had never really been alone, and all along God was drawing you to where you belong. Maybe you discovered guidance for your next steps. What was that like for you?

Which brings us back to how we get from here to there, how we go from wandering or fleeing to following where God is leading you, how we go from desperate and exhausted to nourished and ready to travel, how we come to arrive at the place where God wants us, so we can experience our own moment of clarity. What is the food that sustains us in all those moments, the same food that nourished Elijah?

Jesus proposes in the gospel that he is that food, that feeding on his wisdom, in the community of his followers, feeding “on him,” is the nourishment that God sends. From the beginning of the church we Christians have seen in this eucharistic banquet that food, food for runaways and wanderers, food for the desperate and exhausted, food for those on their way, food that can sustain us to the end. This food not only satisfies our hunger, it is also the sign of God’s own hunger to nourish us, the same manna the fed the Israelites in the desert, the same food that sustained Elijah, the bread that Jesus shared with those who followed him. It’s the same bread.

To eat this living bread is to join our story to their stories, and the story of all God’s people. All of our stories of running away, of wandering, of finding the road, of discovering God's place in our path join Elijah's and the Israelites and Jesus and his followers. In sharing in this bread, we are really fed by God just as they were and really participate in the story of God’s people, because our many stories become part of that story, too.

Even more, our sharing in this living bread creates us as the church, the people who feed on the living bread of Jesus, the people who share God’s hunger to nourish the world and to nourish each other on this long journey. And all of us, wanderers and runaways, searchers and those who think we know where we are headed, wherever we are on the way, we belong here, both to be fed and to feed each other.

What is it like to be a part of this church, to be a part of the story of God’s people, to be nourished here by Jesus, the bread of life, and also to share God’s hunger to feed others? What is that like for you?

August 2, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

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

Bryan Cones

As I was reflecting this week on today’s passage from Exodus, I couldn’t help but think of another “feeding story” of sorts, this one less miraculous. This one’s not in the Bible though, but part of another “canon”: the Hunger Games trilogy for young adults by Suzanne Collins.

The scene I’m thinking of comes as the heroes Katniss and Peeta are coming to the end of their “victory” tour after surviving their first trip to the arena, which culminates in a grand banquet at the presidential palace. The juxtaposition of the poverty and unrest of the districts, and the starvation in their own District 9, and the conspicuous consumption of the Capital is put in sharp relief by that feast. Those few invited to the party, eager to taste every delicacy, routinely consume a beverage that causes them to expel what they’ve already eaten—blessedly off camera—so that they can begin again. The Capital embodies a hunger and thirst that can never be satisfied. Katniss and Peeta are repulsed at the obscene behavior—as the author means us to be as well.

What a contrast to the story of the Exodus: Having just escaped an ancient equivalent of the Capital, the Israelites are now beginning to miss the “fleshpots,” the slave food that their Egyptian masters provided. God responds with free food for a free people, the miracle of the quail and manna—sustenance that rains down from heaven falling on all the people equally, providing what today’s psalm calls the “bread of angels,” which is “food enough” for everyone says the psalm.

It’s a tale of two very different stories, stories that produce two very different worlds, and different accounts of what it means to be human together. As Americans and as Christians, we inevitably inhabit both of them.

I don’t think it much of a stretch to suggest that Collins’ Hunger Games is a dystopian riff on the most negative aspects of our society and global economic system, which produces extravagant wealth and luxury for a few, and bare subsistence for many. The story of Exodus on the other hand doesn’t suggest extravagance or luxury—the heavens don’t rain down red velvet cupcakes or tiger shrimp or buckets of wine. On the contrary, there is both restraint and limit: There are rules that govern the divine abundance. Each Israelite can only collect what they need for the day; any manna kept overnight will rot and be worthless. At no point can the Israelites forget that they are dependent on God’s open hand. It is enough—an abundant enough, but not infinitely so. It’s an “enough” that asks a divine question of the story that drives our American cultural imagination, with its high value on the production and acquisition, even the hoarding, of wealth.

It also proposes a divine question to us who live in this society: Just how much is “enough”?—recognizing that being able to ask the question reflects the privilege of having one’s needs met. When does one’s own share and use of the divine abundance become instead a “fleshpot,” something that reflects our enslavement rather than our freedom? When does a savings account, or a retirement account, or even a parish endowment become an end in itself?

These are deeply spiritual questions that cut to the heart of who we are and who we are called to be. They are also political and economic and social questions about what it means to live with other people in community, about our duties and obligations to one another in society. As those who are baptized, and therefore those who share the privilege of partnering with God in the care of the poor and vulnerable, in the healing of the world, and in the revelation of the reign of God, they are questions we cannot avoid asking, for our own well-being and that of our neighbors. At its heart, the question that lies beneath them all is: By which story shall we live? And what difference does it make?

I am struck by Jesus’ promise in the Gospel of John, to those who feed on the wisdom of the story he tells: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” What Jesus is promising is the opposite of the glorification of hunger and thirst in the Capital: It is the freedom from being driven by the need to possess and consume. It is the freedom from the slavery of striving to keep up, of feeling ourselves always in a deficit, always lacking something, never good enough.

It is not only the physical freedom of having “enough,” it is the spiritual freedom of knowing ourselves as creatures, dependent on a faithful God and called to relationships of justice and freedom with others. It is the freedom we practice as we celebrate this Eucharist, through which we are shaped in the pattern of divine abundance that produces enough for every living thing. Imagine if that freedom we practice here shaped not only our hearts, but the whole creation in which we live and are called to serve.