Christopher Thomas
Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 14, Year B – 8/8/21
2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
Psalm 130
Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
When people show you who they are, believe them!
- Maya Angelou
Do you remember where you were, when you were, who you were, the moment you realized you were an adult?
Were you one of those people that just woke up in the morning knowing what you wanted to do with your life, be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a fire-fighter, that burning desire, that purpose, that goal was already there, and you set your course early on, and got about it?
I always wished I could be that person! I prayed to be that person!
No, my ongoing journey (and it is just that, an ongoing journey, even at 55 years old), seems to have been and continues to be a process of fits and starts, testing one thing, and then trying another. Oh, if adulthood is based solely on a set of responsibilities, accountabilities for resources here and there, I’ve certainly made my share of good decisions and quite a few boners.
But I am nothing if I am not mimetic in my human nature. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I know how to surround myself with those whose world views’ I most admire and have striven and continue to strive to imitate, adopting as my own the creation of this thing I call identity.
And so, my journey to adulthood cycles through a list of saints and sinners, those who have gone before and some who are still here. And my learning seems to be that as each one crosses over, transitions, pierces the veil between this world and the next, each time, I get just a little bit closer to this thing called adulthood.
Now, my mentor and friend Canon John Logan has never claimed to be a spiritual person. He always says, “I’m religious, not spiritual.”
I have known John long enough to know what he means when he says that. It’s a play on the popular cultural phenomenon of today, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” the phrase many use to avoid the identity of organized religion, to opt out of Church (big C). And John is deeply committed to the body of Christ represented in and by the Episcopal Church.
But John is, in fact, deeply spiritual and he reveals to us who he is, when John reads the Gospel, or celebrates the Eucharist. John’s spirituality is wrapped up in his voice. John reads the Gospel as though he actually believes it. The Eucharistic Mass is not simply a script for John. He really believes it. I have known John for 35 of his 68 years of ordained ministry, and it has ALWAYS been like that. He speaks with the authority of knowing that all of this stuff is true, and that has been the bread that John has fed the body of Christ for nearly 70 years. People are assured by the sound of the shepherd’s voice.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
And the religious authorities, who know (everything, because that is what religious authorities know, everything), know where this man called Jesus comes from. He did not descend from God. No, this is Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean, of the questionable paring of Joseph and Mary fame. That is the Jesus we are identifying. And we know!
For how could, after all, our faith be so incarnational? Does God really come among us? How could our faith be standing right here, before us, in flesh, like ours, of all things? “I am the bread of life. Feed on me, and you will never go hungry!”
But that is, after all, what Jesus had gone about, to and fro, demonstrating, in the “I AM” instances, each and every one. Every time a miracle is procured, a soul healed, nourished, fed, returned to life, Jesus shows them, and us, a little bit more about who he, in fact is, incarnation.
It must be uncomfortable when God shows up before you, when, after all, that is not who, or where, or how you expect to encounter God, in the flesh, right in front of you?
For our encounters of God are limited to the readings of scripture, words (small w), partaking of bits and bites of Eucharistic crumbs, imaginings of Christ, on Sunday mornings. If, after all, Christ in the Eucharist takes all of us to be present, then it stands to reason that all of us hold some piece of the divine that is required to “re-member,” to incarnate Christ into our presences, again and again and again.
It makes life easy, when people show us who they are, to divide, to segregate ourselves, break down into “camps,” our different ways of thinking, them vs. us. Conservative vs. liberal. High Church vs. Low Church. Anglo-Catholic vs. Protestant. Male vs. Female. Gay vs. Straight. Republican vs. Democrat. Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.
When people show you who they are, believe them. Because it feels good! “I knew it!” Right triumphs over wrong!
What about when people show you who YOU are?
For that is, I believe, the great gift of Jesus’ incarnational presence in today’s Gospel, not to show them who he was, to claim his own identity, but to show them who THEY were. I don’t know that that was not eventually the most difficult thing for them to hear, and what ultimately led to Jesus’ downfall and demise. When the incarnational presence of God is standing in front of you, challenging everything you think and believe about the world, and God wants to show you something about you, it is scary stuff!
But that’s what relationships are – reflections in others of the things that we like and admire (and maybe more importantly don’t like, and therefore reject) about ourselves! Relationships are reflections of our own divinity AND our own humanity. That is the very gracious gift of relationship, and why we need to be in relationship, with those who are like us, but more importantly, with those who are not like us. Because they show us things about ourselves that help us to grow and to know God more deeply and more fully.
It is easy and comfortable to be in relationship with those who share our virtues and values, for in those relationships, it is easy to see divinity, our own and others’. But in those where difference is the hallmark, I venture that we see more of our humanity, the sides of ourselves that we don’t like, shy away from, or would all together prefer not to see. For how many of us are only a few paychecks from homelessness, or poverty? Why would you want to see the divine on a street corner in downtown Dallas holding a sign asking for money? How could that possibly be the bread of life, living water that promises to quench hunger and thirst?
But we are in this thing called humanity together, all of us. And if we are willing to risk that look into our own humanity, to say “yes, we are all human, yes, but for the grace of God go I,” then we also risk the joy of living into the fullness of God’s mercy and grace. We all go together. That is the great joy and the heartache of incarnation.
“Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.”
When people show you who they are, believe them.
When people show you who YOU are, believe them.
Amen.
