August 17, 2006

InYourFace

Pentecost 11/15B Jn 6.53-59

“As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” [Jn 6.57].

I love Jesus when he cuts the nuances. Hear these words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood and watch the eyeballs roll. Hear them, and you know right now that even his patience is thinning and his time and ours is running out.

William Temple, one of the greater archbishops of Canterbury, spoke of Christianity as the earthiest and least otherworldly of all religions. By that, I believe he meant to affirm the Incarnation as God’s radical way of reminding us that we are already spiritual beings by virtue of our creation, that Jesus is God’s example for our humanity, and that our vocation is not to be more spiritual, but to be more human. And like Jesus is saying, consume me, take me into your life in the most intimate of all ways possible, and let’s get on with it!

John’s in-your-face gospel this morning makes that brutally clear. Jesus is flesh and blood — not some stained-glass irrelevance — and unless we absorb him into our lives that way as God’s model, we “have no life in us.” Unless we come to grips with that reality about him and about ourselves, we’ll be far from experiencing that marvelous and incredible lightness of being which this gospel offers to a world sorely in need, an overwhelming gift of a love that abolishes fear.

It seems that every time we churchers come face to face with this truth about our earthly-grounded, Jesus-centered gospel, we are shattered by crisis and by fear.

First, it was slavery, then we heard the same arguments when we marched in Selma in 1965, when we ordained women in 1974, when we regularized those ordinations in 1976, and when we consecrated the first woman bishop in 1987. Now it’s the full acceptance and recognition of gays and lesbians and the remarkable election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as our presiding bishop. With an incarnational gospel, the word, like the Word, is always made flesh. The talk is made for walking.

In each and every one of these self-inflicted challenges that have come our way, there is the lurking suspicion that somehow, these people — these “others” — either were not fully human or were too human or were the wrong kind of human, at any rate, they were not “like us,” whatever we chose “like us” to mean at the time. We’ve been through one long shakedown cruise after another into the understanding of humanity and human nature, and we have not come into port yet.

Bishop Bill Sanders, once Ordinary of Tennessee, believed that women’s ordination was the most important decision of the church in the twentieth century.

The twenty-first century is yet too soon on the calendar to make any such claim like that by Bishop Sanders, and there are many more decisions awaiting us, but the decisions out in Minneapolis and up in Columbus will, I believe, be seen to come tolerable close to qualifying.

For this Church of ours is on a roll! It is very much in touch with itself. And one of the primary reasons that ha come to pass is the remarkable and creative ministries of hundreds of women, gays, and lesbian priests and bishops over this last quarter-century, and maybe even together with a few of us guys.

With the consent to New Hampshire’s election, with a significant step forward toward claiming the blessing which is ours, with the election of our new Presiding Bishop, and with the refusal to accept the touted Windsor Report for anything more than the invitation to conversation that it is, this church has come out of the closet. This church has entered firmly into this century, in faithful service to its Lord and renewed commitment to its Baptismal Covenant. And as well has it stepped forth as a leader and example to everyone — to religious people of all persuasions and to those of none, to this nation, to its president, and to the world.

So how do we come down off that high? We must, you know. We cannot just sit pretty on the mountain, all transfigured and cozying up with Jesus. How do we incarnate that good news over and over into our own lives? How do we make this new and radical turn in our own flesh and blood and in that of others?

By sheer coincidence — that’s God acting anonymously — the Old Testament lesson from the Book of Proverbs this morning tells us that wisdom is a mighty handy resource about now and, what is more, surprise, wisdom is a woman.

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,” she says [Prov 8.22]. Which is to say that she, wisdom, was there when God made the heaven, the sea, the earth. It was as if God needed a woman’s imagination to help make them, a woman’s eye to make sure they were made right, a woman’s spirit by which to measure their beauty. Wisdom is not only a matter of the mind, but of the intuition and of the heart where imagination, discernment, and spirit become the very blueprint of its dimensions. [Fred Buechner said it in Whistling in the Dark, Harper & Row, p 112, 1988]

Wisdom — imagination, discernment, spirit. Imagination to continue to create what has never happened before. Discernment to continue to evaluate our times and our place within them, remembering Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian, who admonished every Christian to keep the Bible in one hand and the daily news in the other.

Imagination, discernment, and the Spirit to reopen ourselves to a servanthood energized, shaped, and emboldened to breach old boundaries. We must continue to pray for and adopt an empowering innerness and an explosive outwardness. One is the intensive energy of galvanizing commitment, the other, the extensive power of lavish inclusiveness that embraces the whole of humanity in a geography without boundaries [cf Bennett Sims, Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium, Cowley, 1997, p 66].

You know, by the grace of God, we may well have been prophetic. And now by that same grace, we must become thoughtfully pastoral. Our parishes, where the rubber meets the road, must become well-equipped to assume the stole of servant leadership Jesus calls us to. We cannot rest in the false security of religion and so-called orthodoxy as would so many, even the well-intentioned.

Several other denominations have been stalling for years on what we are now affirming. Everyone should be welcomed. No one should be content with second-class citizenship and excluded from leadership. There is no room for pretense, least of all in the church.

We as Christians need to get past this enervating debate so that we can move on to other pressing issues that require the churches’ attention, such as the growing gap between the rich and the poor — about which Jesus did have something very clear to say.

Our church has refreshingly and deliberately come to a decision about the nagging questions that have paralyzed so many other churches. Unlike many of our fellows and leaders, I am proud of our church and that I am an Episcopalian, for together with you and you and you, I am that church. And I am not equivocating or preaching any eulogies or draping any black crepe over that proud fact.

Let us continue to embrace that selfless risk of faith and love, peace and justice, and to care for the wounded, feed the hungry, and show compassion to the brokenhearted and to the broken-spirited, perhaps any of those who’ve hung out the black crepe, as well. As Bishop Gene Robinson reminds us so often, “We’re all going to heaven… so lighten up. And, as well, for those who despise us, love ‘em, anyway.”

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