Feeding the Multitude

In September our church will be hosting its second annual community picnic in the park across the street. Last year’s picnic grew out of discussions in the Outreach Team over what we could do for the surrounding community, which ranges from well-to-do to hand-to-mouth. Most church activities revolve around food, and weekday visitors often ask for food vouchers redeemable at the local supermarket, so the decision was made to get the entire parish involved in feeding people. It worked. Everyone had a good time.

The planning for this year’s picnic started in March. Three especially energetic new team members jumped on the chance to organize it, so now we have a menu, food sources, grill, entertainment, advertising, alternate rain location, and organizational chart. Soon there will be personal calls to everyone in the parish, signing them up for jobs. The picnic happens to be on September 11, so the tenth anniversary of 9/11 has been incorporated. It’s a lot of work, but everyone enjoys it. We hope to feed some two hundred people – or whoever shows up.

Jesus, too, fed whoever showed up. In contrast to our careful planning, however, Jesus simply took what was at hand and managed to make it stretch to five thousand men, besides women and children. (Doesn’t that “besides” get you? At least Matthew includes the women and children. Mark just has men.)

Jesus’ disciples clearly are not as thrilled about the prospect of feeding everyone as our Outreach Team. They seem a bit peeved that a crowd showed up in a deserted place where Jesus was supposed to get some down time. It didn’t help that he preached right through the dinner hour. When their stomachs were growling and they were eyeing the bread and fish they’d brought along, Jesus had the nerve to tell them to feed everyone. Not having a cooler full of meat and ten bags of charcoal handy, they protested.

So Jesus took the little that they had. He blessed it, broke, it, and gave it back to them so that they could feed everyone. And they did. Not only that, but when they cleaned up afterwards they filled twelve baskets with what remained.

It was only in connection with Jesus that the disciples were able to feed those thousands of people. It will only be in connection with Jesus that our church will be able to put on a community picnic. It is the Spirit of Christ within that makes us want to help others in the first place. It is the love of God revealed to us through Jesus Christ that brings us together as a Christian community. It is the joy of Jesus that will be expressed that day.

If we do start to run out of food in September, someone will make a quick trip to the store. No one will ask me to take, bless, break, and give what’s available, expecting that it will miraculously multiply. Jesus will be present, but we still have to do the work. And by the grace of God, everyone will eat and be filled.

[Pentecost 8: Matthew 14:13-21.]

Life in the Spirit

This week three kinds of Bible readings greet us. First is the story of how Jacob, the ancestor of all Israel, got his first two wives. The second is one of the Apostle Paul’s closely reasoned arguments from his letter to the Romans. And last is a series of short parables from Jesus, each beginning with “the kingdom of heaven is like…” Three passages from continuous readings of three books of the Bible, so it’s not surprising that they don’t intersect with one another but rather seem to run parallel.

I’m not going to spend time with Jacob. To make sense of his story I’d have to supply a lot of background before getting to the point. Suffice it to say that summarizing it as “how he got his first two wives” shows what kind of “family values” are in the Bible.

Paul is worth the hard work of understanding, especially the eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans, often described as “Life in the Spirit.” Last week we saw how all “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God” – a claim that always astonishes me, that not just we, but everything that exists, await redemption through Jesus Christ.

Yet Paul well knows that though redemption is promised, it has not fully arrived. The yearning for it is so deep that we cannot find words to express it. Here the Spirit helps us, for God, too, knows that deep yearning, and wordlessly speaks it in our hearts. That Spirit brings us comfort, hope, and patience.

And it brought Paul the conviction that nothing can separate us from God’s love. He ends this section with a Spirit-filled expression of great power. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Nothing. Nada. Nothing in creation can separate us from the love of God.

The power of that love, the all-encompassing nature of that love, Jesus shows us in a few short parables. What starts out as small as a seed becomes mighty; it fills everything like yeast in dough; it’s worth paying any price to get. Yet it is possible to reject God’s love. Why anyone would do that is beyond me, but God does give us the awful freedom to walk the other way. The end result as described by Jesus is sobering.

This Sunday I will be baptizing a three-month-old infant. Talk about a mustard seed! Through water and the Holy Spirit she will be raised to a new life of grace. She will be sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. When she yearns too deeply for words, the Spirit will intercede with God for her. Those are promises we are all given at baptism. It takes a lifetime to learn their truth – that nothing in all creation will ever separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.

[Pentecost 6: Genesis 29:15-28; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52.]

Weeds

One of the botany courses I used to teach was plant identification. When we got to the section on lawn weeds, I brought the class to my home. R still talks about it. I would excitedly walk around our property identifying all the weeds and the students would dutifully take notes. I can only imagine what must have been going through their heads!

Occasionally a “complimentary” lawn analysis would be left on our door by a local lawn care company. If they made the mistake of following up with a call, I good-naturedly berated them for listing so few plants, and then proceeded to tell them all of the species they missed. Soon they would be laughing and I had made my point: I was not a potential customer.

What is a weed, anyway? Basically, it’s a plant that’s out of place. Many, like dandelions, hitchhiked from Eurasia. Most people would consider dandelion a weed, but if they aren’t useful, why are they made into wine or used in salad? It’s curious how the whole concept of what does and does not belong in a lawn changed with the invention of herbicides and the desire to make money from them.

Agricultural weeds are a different story. In abundance, they can reduce crop yield. They gum up machinery. And some are just plain noxious, poisonous to people and cattle, or so invasive that they outcompete everything else. There’s even a USDA website for them.

One of the chief candidates for the “weeds” (KJV “tares”) in this week’s Gospel is such a plant, the black darnel or ryegrass (Lolium temulentum to a botanist). It isn’t true rye (that’s Secale cereale) but a lookalike to both wheat and rye, at least when it’s young. It can also be home to a fungus that, when present, makes darnel toxic. Not something you’d want in your wheat field.

So when the biblical farmer’s servants noticed darnel coming up with the wheat, he knew something was amiss. He must have had a nasty neighbor, whom he immediately suspected of skulking about at night with some bad seed. Rather than risk disturbing the wheat, the farmer opted to wait until the harvest and then separate the desirable crop from the weeds.

Matthew provides an interpretation of this parable. The interpretation sounds like Matthew, but the story does not, so there’s a possibility that the parable existed before its explanation. There are some characteristic images picked up by the interpretation: God as the sower, God’s people as the good seed, Satan as the enemy. Yet the story clearly states that evil’s immediate removal is not desirable. Rather, the outcome is what matters. The desire is to harvest good fruit, just as we saw in last week’s parable of the sower.

That’s an important message in a time when so many are anxious to define who is good and uproot those considered evil. The existence of evil cannot be denied or ignored. Yet that is not the primary focus of the parable. Growth and fruitfulness are. True, growth can be hindered by evil, but the Spirit cannot be stopped. Faithful growth will bear fruit.

We don’t have many weeds in our lawn any more, as our new house has fewer trees shading a healthier lawn. I no longer need the lawn as a teaching tool, either. Yet I still have a fondness for plants whose names I know, about whom I can tell stories of their journey to this continent. I’m still willing to let some weeds grow where they are not wanted. And now I have a parable from Jesus to back me up for doing so. I can leave them alone until harvest time.

[Pentecost 5: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.]

A Smooth Man

My dad always liked the story of Jacob and Esau. Maybe it reminded him of his brothers, who could be as wily and mischievous as Jacob. They resembled one another in appearance, and once my grandfather on my mother’s side mistook one Horn brother for another, who played the part so well that my grandfather never caught on.

Dad’s favorite statement of Jacob’s was “my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man” (Genesis 27:11). It always made him laugh. I don’t know why. He was indeed a smooth man; his thin hairless legs gave him the nickname “Birdlegs” when he ran track in college.

Maybe the attraction of Jacob and Esau was how true to life the stories are. Even in the womb they struggled so much that their mother, Rebekah, said out loud, “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” Surely my dad saw the exasperation on his own mother’s face as she struggled to raise eight children. And that wonderful image of Jacob coming out of the womb with his hand firmly gripping his brother’s heel. This was not going to be a peaceful household!

It didn’t help that Rebekah loved Jacob and Isaac loved Esau. Later she would help Jacob cheat his brother out of their father’s blessing. Last Sunday’s passage is a preview of this, and shows Esau as a man with more belly than brains. It isn’t as easy to find game as it is to cook up some lentils, so when Esau drags in at the end of a fruitless hunt, he readily does whatever Jacob asks just to get some dinner. Unfortunately for the slow-witted Esau, what he trades are his rights as first-born – which, admittedly, aren’t very filling when you’re hungry.

These stories aren’t intended to be historical biography, of course. They explain why the children of Jacob (Israel) didn’t get along with their distant kin, the children of Esau (Edom). Some also see them as part of the age-old conflict between nomadic hunters and settled farmers. For me, though, and probably for my dad, they show how well the biblical writers understood human nature, and how little that nature has changed over thousands of years.

That’s really what makes the Bible come alive for me. These aren’t ancient myths told by pre-scientific primitives. They are keen insights into how the world works, especially how people work. Genesis, in particular, is breathtaking in its description of how God enters into history, using someone as scheming as Jacob to create a promise that will one day be fulfilled in Jesus Christ. If these stories weren’t true to life, they wouldn’t have much meaning for me.

As far as I know, the Horn brothers never took advantage of one another except perhaps in jest, as with my maternal grandfather. In that sense, the resemblance to Jacob and Esau isn’t that strong. Yet families still have conflict, people still wheel and deal, and some make poor choices. In spite of all our human failings, God works with us and makes out of us something more than we can ask or imagine. Through God we become a blessing to others. And that’s true whether we are hairy or smooth.

[Pentecost 4: Genesis 25:19-24. I'm now back from vacation, so this is posted a bit late.]

Trinity

I like it when Trinity Sunday and Father’s Day coincide. It reminds me of what Gregory of Nazianzus said in his writings about the Trinity: the existence of God the Father is dependent on the existence of God the Son, because a Begetter could not exist without one who is Begotten. In the same way, a man is not a father without a child. Nice parallelism.

This Sunday we hear the Great Commission, the passage at the end of the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells the disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” – or as the stained glass window at our church puts it, “Go to therefore…” Matthew also has the only Trinitarian formula in the Gospels, “…baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Many scholars insist that this is the early church inserting words into Matthew’s text, but John Nolland doesn’t. Instead, he says, Matthew is neatly summarizing all that he has written. “Matthew’s story has been about the action of the Father through the Son and by means of the Holy Spirit. And that is what the baptized are joined to.”

In a sense, that’s what the whole Bible is about. We will also hear the [first] story of creation in Genesis, in which God as Creator moves as Spirit over the waters and speaks the Word/Son who causes all to come into being. For Christians, the Trinity is present right from the beginning of creation.

Father’s Day in Burlington is when the annual Snake Alley Art Fair is held. Because the church is so close to Snake Alley, parking is practically nonexistent after 8 a.m. So we will have an early service and then serve breakfast to whomever wanders in from the art fair. After taking in the artwork myself, I’ll return to the church to provide a spoken Eucharist for the kitchen help. It will be a low Sunday, as Trinity Sunday typically is. That’s unfortunate. A Trinity sermon on Father’s Day might be just the thing to help people comprehend what is one of Christianity’s most distinctive and least understood doctrines.

[Pentecost 1, Trinity Sunday: Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Matthew 28:16-20. The quote from Nolland’s book is on page 1269.]

Breath

In the middle of one night when N was about four years old, I awoke to find him standing next to our bed. I had been sound asleep, yet in that deep sleep I heard him breathing. He was quiet, barely audible even when I was fully awake, but it was his breath, and as a parent I knew that he was there and needed something. So I woke myself up.

Throughout N’s youth he had a “reactive airway” – not really asthma, but enough to give him an inhaler. And a cough. In a roomful of noisy children, R could pick out his cough and know he was there.

We don’t usually think of breath as being distinctive. Breathing is just something we do. But anyone with asthma or COPD knows how important breath is. Anyone who takes a CPR class learns how to breathe for someone else. Anyone who has been present at a death, whether of human or pet, knows the finality of that last breath – “a breath that goes forth and does not return,” as the psalmist says.

Several languages, including Greek and Hebrew, use the same word for breath and spirit, recognizing that the spirit departs when the breath ends. This multivalent meaning for one word creates some interesting ambiguities. In Genesis, God’s Spirit moves over the face of the waters. Or is it his breath? Does God give breath to Adam, or spirit? God speaks the Word in creation, but to speak God must use Breath/Spirit. And so the Trinity is present right from the beginning of creation.

This Sunday is Pentecost, the festival that celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples of Jesus (and thus to the Church). The familiar version of that story, in which the disciples speak in different languages, is told in the Acts of the Apostles. Sunday’s Gospel reading from John has a very different tradition. John says that on the very day of the resurrection, Easter itself, Jesus came to the disciples through closed doors, stood and their midst, and said “Peace to you.” Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He breathed on them. In Greek it’s the same word used for God’s breathing life into Adam, and for the breath that Ezekiel prophesied into the dry bones in the valley. It’s the breath of life. But this breath comes from the resurrected Jesus. It is a new creation, new life, a new spirit that Jesus breathes.

It’s a Spirit that does not go forth, never to return. In baptism we are marked as Christ’s own forever. The Holy Spirit remains with us throughout our lives and beyond. Yet I often wonder how well we listen to that Spirit. Are we like a watchful parent, waking up when it is there next to us? Can we pick out the true Spirit in a noisy culture calling to us with many spirits that are not from God?

N has long since grown up and moved away. Given how loudly I snore now, I don’t know if I’d hear him anyway. Yet I still work to hear that voice of God, to breathe that breath of Jesus, to have the words “Peace to you” in my ears. Baptized in the name of the Trinity, sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s own forever, we are all part of the new creation. And that’s true no matter what language we speak.

[Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 20:19-23.]

That They May Be One

There are times when I wish the life of faith were a whole lot simpler. There’s a certain satisfaction in viewing the Bible as an answer book, a set of propositions that will fit any situation. All it takes is an index that will connect each problem to the appropriate verse, and voilá! the problem is solved. The fact that such Bibles exist makes me realize what I’m up against in insisting on more depth and complexity in Scripture.

In spite of my wish for something simpler, I can’t go there. Maybe that’s because I like the Gospel of John so much. It’s hard to extract simple propositions from John unless they’re so basic as to be almost useless (“God is love,” for instance.) No wonder most people prefer Matthew, Mark, and Luke! John is much less direct and more open to interpretation. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes the last verse of Sunday’s passage (“that they may be one, as we are one”) to promote the unity of all Christians – a worthwhile goal, until you realize that they mean everyone needs to return to the Roman Catholic Church.

That desire for unity seems to reside close to the desire for uniformity, which itself emphasizes authority, of pope or pastor. That’s one reason I shy away from magisterial interpretations of the Bible, where Father knows best and the laity are supposed to believe whatever they’re told. The self-help Bibles may seem to be at the other extreme, but they’re not; someone created that index which purports to answer every need. Either way, we’re told to obey the authority of someone else.

So where does John’s Gospel fit in? I am often mystified myself about what he’s saying, and reading him in Greek doesn’t help much. But there are a few things that do seem clear. For one, he continually emphasizes the eternal relation of the Son to the Father. Jesus came from God and would return to him in glory: “So now, Father, glorify me…with the glory I had in your presence before the world existed.”

It is into this eternal relationship that we are invited to enter by being disciples of Jesus Christ. (And yes, it is an eternal relationship of Love.) That is what true unity is about, the unity of God. Just as one God exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so also we are created as persons in order to exist in relationship with one God and one another.

A simple enough idea, perhaps. It’s the living of it that is so difficult. I’m blessed to be in a church community whose members get along pretty well, but I don’t have illusions that we are all unified. (All I have to do is propose changing the carpet!) The local Lutherans and Episcopalians celebrate their common mission through joint Ascension and Epiphany services, but the area council of churches has such a conservative focus that I’m uncomfortable at their meetings. The divisions of Christianity are a great scandal and an impediment to mission.

So a simple life of faith is illusory. Life itself is not that simple; why should faith be? Yet I can still long for unity in Christ, to be one, as God is one. That unity will not come until God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. In the meantime we can work toward unity, the coming of God’s kingdom upon earth.

[Easter 7, the Sunday after the Ascension. John 17:1-11.]