The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost Year B, Proper 16
The Twelfth Sunday after
Pentecost
Year B, Proper 16
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black
1 Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11,
22-30, 41-4
Psalm 84
Ephesians 6: 10-20
John 6:56-69
Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrims' way. AMEN.
As Solomon dedicates his temple, he prays, "that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel, and so that they may know that your name has been invoked on this house that I have built." He was dedicating a physical temple, a huge and spectacular building, but even as physical as that dedication was, he seems to be issuing a challenge, hope, or commitment to a kind of unity of worshiping the One Holy One, akin to the collect's prayer that the Church being gathered together in unity by the Holy Spirit may show forth power among all peoples. This is a difficult teaching. Who can accept is, since we have every evidence that unity is not the hallmark of the church, and all people of the earth don't know or fear the same God.
Today we come to the fourth John "bread of life" text, "This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever...It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words /Jesus says/ that he has spoken are spirit and life." Three weeks ago the people "ate their fill" demonstrating taste. The next week we learned that "All who see the Son," so sight, while last week's lesson said, "Truly comprehending that Jesus is the Wisdom of God" and that could be understood as hearing. Today's words are about getting it, or touching Jesus, but there is no single parts of humans that are isolated to do touching. Hands and fingers, feet and toes, noses (Eskimo kisses,) hair-think of Mary Magdalene's long hair washing Jesus' feet-and so on, all do touching. The touching comes and goes out from people, active touching, and also not passive, but being touched, being the one who receives the touching as well as does the touching. All of people's bodies are involved with touching, and receiving touch. Touching also means understanding in an emotional way, beyond just the physical, "Your call touched me," and other simple and complex metaphorical meanings. What was so difficult about this "bread of life" section is Jesus challenges his group to see whether he'd touched them, reached them, and if he had, then what? Some left, so Jesus asked the twelve, "Do you wish to go away?"
This is one of the times Simon Peter gets it. "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God." He's saying, "You touched me where I live, and move, and have my being." He understands that the flesh is not unimportant or useless for living one's life. It is only with our flesh that we taste, see, hear, and touch any reality, especially the Holy One of God. It is only as ourselves can we touch or be touched by the Holy One. Think of touchstones. They were originally hard black stones, like basalt. When a gold or silver sample was scratched on the touchstone, the streaks that were made could be compared with marks left by an alloy, and so the real could be known, identified, and kept. If Jesus is our touchstone, we can only test him out, and test ourselves with our real senses. Meister Eckhart said "that God's ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us," and that can only happen as we are, whole and real. Again as physical and real as it gets, as Madeleine L'Engle summarized this Gospel, God says, "I love you enough to come and be with you. And because I live forever, you will too" and that's about real bodies, real flesh.
How, though, in the face of evil, of reality of even less harsh sorts, of daily living do we keep rubbing that touchstone to recognize and keep away "the cosmic powers of this present darkness," not to put too fine a point on it. If we really think there are no evils and no force of Evil, I might suggest we haven't been paying attention again. Whether we name the -isms, which beset our society, or personal stabs of jealousy, mean spiritednesses, or even architectural details. (I went to Morocco for a minute this week. The Moroccan flag is green with a tracing of a 5-pointed red star. I looked up at the façade of one wall of one of the king's palaces and carved into the solid wall were holes, places for light or to lighten the weight of the wall, and they were 6-pointed stars. I asked someone why the change, or was it a change of design, or something else. I was told that when Morocco was a French protectorate, just after the Dreyfuss affair, early in the 20th century, the French changed the design of the Moroccan-not their own- star to 5 points, lest it look Jewish, sympathetic to Jewishness, and was in fact, in an intentional anti-Semitic move. Stars, architectural details, history, long-term civilities, changed in the spirit of hostility, and think what the leadership of that design change permitted, encouraged, led to, and was not necessary at all. Just plain evil.)
Paul suggests they way ahead is to protect ourselves with the full armor of faith. I like the idea, sort of, but there must be a way of saying the same thing that does not suggest wars or battles. True, none of the armor is for offensive purposes, but there must be other ways to push evil back, and transform it. Reading the pieces of equipment Paul sketches, this time the shoes stood out... "As shoes for your feet, put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel, the good news, of peace." While those may be sturdy sandals to cover territory and reach many people, they also might be party shoes to go where people are festive but isolated from the good news of peace. They might be combat boots to protect voters, or firefighters boots to rescue endangered people. Those shoes are what you wear, what each of us wears to help bring about God's reign.
Here are some pieces of the armor, described by Matt Fitzgerald, a UCC minister in Wellesley, that don't protect us well. "The breastplate of ministerial self-righteousness will not protect me. I have learned over the years that a helmet made of bourbon and a sword forged from cynicism are also insufficient, as are prosperity, religious Zeal, fitness, and even family. None of these are strong enough to thwart the forces of chaos and disorder that upend even the most righteous of lives." Weakness in it self is not protection either. We are each vulnerable, limited, isolated, and we cannot go it alone, and at our end, only God can be with us. When we get to that concept of protection, God's watchfulness, who can be against us? The armor Paul aims to provide is God's armor for us, and God will select what we need, if we pay attention. God can only offer us that when we let our carapace crack keeping God from our real selves. God offers us protection freely- God with us, Jesus Emanuel.
There are other sorts of shields. Our Muslim hosts demonstrated that in the ways friends do. One gave me an extravagant present. He wanted to give it to me, and it gave him pleasure. It's not what we do. His wife assured me that what you give freely with love to another, you receive back tenfold." She woke me at 4 am so she could get me to the airport by 4.45, and to keep the person who would usually have done the airport run for her from having to rise at that ridiculous hour. Tenfold would hardly seem enough.
There are other examples of newly researched evil and the unexpected shields that are emerging. Here's a statistic: more girls, according to the Herald Tribune, have died in the last 50 years, because they were girls, than men were killed on the battlefield in ALL the wars of the 20th century. Maternal mortality statistics are as grim in some parts of the world. In Niger, 1 in 7 women stand the chance of dying in childbirth, if the statistics there are even close to correct. The other side of these horrors is the emerging commitment to women and girls' education. An MIT study found in an Ivory Coast study that looked at what men vs women did with the money their own tiny crops produced. Men grew coffee, cocoa, and pineapple, and women grew plantains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. When the men's crops flourished, the households spent more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women had a good crop, the households spent more on food, particularly beef. Another series of studies of very poor African farmers finds that when women hold the assets, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing than when men hold the assets. These are new sociological shields we can learn about and help provide. In East Asia people say that the only thing worse for rural women going into factories and sweat shops is... not going in to them. When they stay in the country, not only do they do back-breaking labor, but also the date of motherhood is far earlier, and education is less likely to be achieved. It's a curious world.
Solomon tried to arm his people with a mighty temple, but not only was the physical temple destroyed, his people later were attacked in part for their sure alignment with their one Holy One. Paul wants us to arm against the wickedness of the world, but that seems to me only somewhat useful, because it's a passive stance. Think of the perfect armor in any medieval collection-it's all outmoded because the weapons of destruction changed, outgunned whatever armor people can devise. Peter gets it right. Where can we go? Jesus has the words of eternal life. Lets find our own shoes to make us ready to proclaim the good news of peace, and that proclamation, that effort, that work, that ministry, will return and bless us ten-fold. "God says: I love you enough to come and be with you. And because I live forever, you will too." That's good news.
© Katharine C. Black, August 2009
