You Forget Yourself

Text: James 1:17-27

A young woman, speaking on the floor of the Lutheran national Assembly last week, said that the church is losing young members. She meant not just the Lutheran church but most Christian churches. She said that the reason that was happening was because too many Christians seemed to be hypocritical. “We have very good hypocrisy detectors,” she said. She was talking about a particular and common hypocrisy. She was talking at the time about how often church preached love for neighbor and enemy, and how often at the same the church excluded whole populations and turned them away for one reason or another.

Churches do this commonly, and mostly always have. There are other hypocrisies of Christians. And others, not just young people, who therefore reject the church. Jesus holds his followers to a high and difficult standard. Jesus preached against the grain of the culture. Jesus preached a new world in which things would be different. Very different. But for many who watch the way Christians behave, the new world looks just like the old world. Or worse. Christians spend a lot of time talking about Jesus, but not so much time doing as Jesus said to do. Yes, Jesus loves us, but Jesus talked less about how he and we love each other and more about how we might love others. Jesus’ love for us is love for people and his exhortations to us are to love people as he did. That is hard, which I’m sure you know because I’m sure you have tried it. Often. The hypocrisy that people see in Christians (and Christians see themselves)—the hypocrisy people see most is a lot of yak, yak, yak and not much love, love, love. That, at least, is what James saw. James, the one who provided us with the scripture reading for today.

Martin Luther, chief reformer and a man of strong opinions, hated James. He hated James because at one point (in chapter 2, verse 24, to be exact) James wrote that “by works a person is justified, not by faith alone.” Since Luther pretty much built his career and the church on saying the opposite, he thought James was off the mark and that he should have been kicked out of the Bible. Really. He thought this epistle of James should not have been in the Bible. But, three things: first of all, fortunately, it was not Luther who got to decide what was in and what was out. Second, many other churchy thinkers, from the second century onwards, have liked James a lot. And third, a lot of what James wrote fit in exactly with what Luther said. Luther was a man whose faith powered him to radical and transforming actions, just as James said our faith should power us.

James was an exhorter. He liked to tell people what to do. That can be good. It can be good in the way James did it. What James did was to remind his readers—us, among others—of things they already knew and maybe had forgotten. And the main thing we forget is that our faith calls us to act, to do things.

People spend a lot of time looking into mirrors, James says. And when they leave, he says, they forget what they were like. You can interpret this two ways. You could think that when they looked into the mirror they saw who they really were. But they had very very short memories. As soon as they turned away, they forgot. Forgot immediately, as James says. Or, which seems more likely to me, they used to know who they really were. But something about looking in the mirror made them forget. It was an amnesiac. So, we might think about why mirror-looking might do that to us. And we then might think about who we really were before we forgot.

There are two problems with looking in a mirror. The first problem is that we are doing the looking. And the second problem is that what we are looking at is us.

When we look into a mirror, we bring all our baggage with us. It is hard to be objective. Impossible, really, since we are both the subject and the object. We are judges of what we see. On the one hand, for example, it turns out that 85% of Americans think they are more handsome and beautiful than average. We see ourselves better than perhaps we are. On the other hand, many of us see only flaws in ourselves. We think we are too much one thing or another, or too distorted, or unlovable. So when we look into a mirror, we have a hard time seeing ourselves as others see us. Which is probably some combination of big-time jerk and really nice person.

And the other thing is that when we look in a mirror, we are paying a lot of attention to us. To Me, with a capital M. The object of our gaze is Me. What an interesting person in the mirror, we think. Not everyone—hard to believe—looks as closely at us as we do ourselves. They have their own stuff to worry about. But we, looking in the mirror, don’t really see anything about them. Nothing about the sorrow or happiness or concerns they might have. “Me” is pretty distracting. So when looking in the mirror, we are partial and prejudiced judges who at the moment are oblivious to others.

It is hard to reconcile that with the teachings of Jesus.

So James reminds us. James pulls us away from our enraptured captivity in front of the mirror. Like Meg does Charles Wallace, if you have read Wrinkle in Time. James saves us. Remember! James says. Remember who you are, my brothers and sisters. You are God’s. The God who gave us birth. God who created us as God’s creatures. God who is the source of every good gift—meaning every thing—the source of all reality. And James also reminds us that life with God is covenantal. That is, we have an agreement, or covenant. We made a deal about being God’s people and doing what God says.

Lots of religious folks these days are spending a lot of time telling everyone else about themselves, about themselves the religious folk. They are ranting and raving, really, and speaking very loudly. It seems as if they are speaking about God, but they are usually speaking about how good for them God is. It is good that God is good, but the emphasis here is on whom God is good for, which is that Me person again.

And they are very angry. At pretty much everything. It evidently is OK to do that. Years ago I attended a lecture in which the instructor gave us a short bio of his life. He drew a long timeline on the blackboard, and in the middle wrote a caption: Years of anger and rage. Everyone thought that was cool, because it was cool at the time to be in a rage about things. And about people. So rage was in then, and it still is. We hope when being rage-full to enlist God on our side. Somehow people think that God likes people to be angry. But it is arrogant to think that because you are angry that God will be angry, too. Maybe God does get angry, I’m not sure. But if so or if not, it is not because you think God should be. Be slow to anger, writes James. Your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Or another way to say it: your anger does not affect God’s opinions much.

James says we should not talk so much. Be slow to speak, he says. Be quick to listen. And once we’ve done that, which is hard enough, do more than listen. Don’t just listen, do something. Be doers of the word—doers of the word, mind you, not just any doings—be doers of the word and not merely hearers. (I have to add here that he also says to rid yourselves of “all rank growth of wickedness”; but the King James Version of the Bible puts it more colorfully as “superfluity of naughtiness.”) It is not enough to take all these words of Jesus into ourselves and have nothing good come out. Later in the epistle James says, “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?” What good is it? Religion that does nothing is, James says, worthless. It is empty. It is a non-starter.

Do what your faith professes. Walk the walk if you are going to talk the talk. And the talk, James reminds us, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress. Which is Bible shorthand for “take care of all people.” And also to keep oneself unstained by the world. The world stains through pride, power, fear, selfishness. But the law of God, according to James—and Jesus—is the love of one’s neighbor. Humility (what James calls meekness), servanthood, peace, and compassion.

The word of Jesus is grafted onto his followers. It is implanted in us. We are changed by it. But that change is not in theory. It does not lead to a theoretical understanding of God and us. It sits in us, a reminder of who we are and who made us and who, besides us, that creator loves, and what we should do about that.

Listen to James: Don’t forget.

Eating. A Difficult Teaching.

Text: John 6:51-69

Let’s be perfectly clear. As if that were possible.

We would like to be clear about doctrine. How does salvation work, for example? We would like to be clear about morality. What is good behavior and what is not? We would like to be clear about ethics. What is just? We would like to be clear about the future. What will happen to us and when? We struggle, sometimes, to make sense of things. We would like to understand how things work. In light of what we would like, today’s Gospel reading is difficult. That’s what many of the disciples thought. “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” they said.

Over the past few weeks we’ve heard a lot about bread from our friend John, the Gospel writer. This whole section of the Gospel of John, chapter six, is called the Bread of Life Discourse. It starts with a story of how the stomachs of 5000 people were filled with just five loaves of barley bread. It ends today, with a teaching about bread and flesh that most disciples can not stomach.

It is not clear exactly what John is trying to do here. It has been unclear from the very beginning. If you find it confusing, you are not alone. The earliest church thinkers did not agree how to interpret what John wrote about what Jesus said. Some thought that Jesus meant that the bread he is talking about—the bread of life—means his teachings. For those thinkers, this discourse has a lot to do with believing, and in particular believing the right thing. For them, when Jesus says “whoever believes has eternal life”—that is the key message. But others thought that Jesus was clearly speaking about the Eucharist. For those thinkers, this passage is John’s equivalent of the Last Supper story in the other Gospels (there is no Last Supper scene in John). For them, when Jesus says “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not live”—that is the point. And some, of course, say both interpretations are right. Or wrong.

Either way, it is hard not to be moved by what Jesus says. Both the power of belief and the power of the sacrament of the Eucharist have moved people of faith for millennia. But while the believing section has been relatively easy to swallow, the bread and flesh part has not. At least intellectually, if not liturgically. For many people this passage is the make-or-break part of Christianity. For some it is the most difficult and creepy part of Christian teachings and practice. For others, it is the most powerful and nourishing part.

Nonetheless, there is no way to get around this eating-flesh scene. People do try. In the Reformation, 500 years ago, Martin Luther had a famous debate with another reformer named Zwingli over whether Jesus was really, truly, in the bread. Zwingli was squeamish about it. He said that Jesus did not really mean what he said. In the Eucharist, which is what they were discussing, Jesus was in heaven and the bread was here on earth. It was just bread. Folks were not really eating Jesus. Luther, as usual, interpreted things in an earthy and common way. I am the bread, says Jesus. This is my body, says Jesus. Flesh. It may not be understandable, Luther said, but it is certainly clear.

Christian churches choose sides more or less with either Zwingli or Luther. Lutherans and others say, when distributing the bread, “the body of Christ, given for you,” or similar words. But not all churches do. At a church nearby, the people complained that the body and blood talk made them feel “deeply alienated” and therefore when they shared the bread, they said “because you are, I am.” You can think what you like about that. But in any case, what Jesus said makes people squeamish. It always has and it still does.

Theology has been called the endeavor of “faith seeking understanding.” And liturgy means “the work of the people.” There is a nice balance in Christian life between faithful thinking and faithful doing. There is no requirement by Jesus that we understand all about our faith. There is a requirement that we do some things, like share in the Lord’s Supper. And to gather together. And to pray. And to serve others. Sometimes our understanding leads us to do those things but just as often, if not more often, doing those things leads to an understanding.

The danger of all of us who long for clarity and certainty is that we ignore the squeamish and icky and mysterious parts of the teachings of Jesus and substitute in their place an intellectualized version of him. A colleague of mine wrote that sometimes we imprison “Christ inside our minds, turning him over and over like a rock in a tumbler until he is polished and smooth, pleasing and easy to believe in.” But Jesus is not so easy.

There is a lot of talk by Jesus about food. (Some people conclude that therefore Jesus must have been a Lutheran.) Eating, for all it is so commonplace, is mysterious. Eating merges things together that are otherwise separate. It does this in a social way, as when Jesus insists on eating with the wrong sort of people. Or as it does when we all gather to eat with one another here at Faith and become more connected. Or as it does in Faith Kitchen, when eating reconciles people—even if temporarily—people who are otherwise unfriendly.

But eating also merges things in a more physical and animal way. Things we eat become part of us. Those vegetables become us. That chicken becomes us. These mushrooms become us. It is a little creepy. Eating takes parts of other living things and creatures and makes them into parts of us. If it were not so necessary for life, it, too, might make us squeamish.

John’s understanding is that the power and effect of Jesus is that Jesus and we are somehow intertwined. In the words of Jesus as quoted by John, Jesus abides in us and we abide in him. This mutual abiding-in appears all over John, and it appears in this chapter. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them, Jesus says. We may not understand how this all works—Luther said to leave that all to the philosophers—we may not understand how it works, but we can see immediately how it is something like eating. Eating makes things be a part of us. And eating something together makes us part of something. Eating does away with distinctions that otherwise seem so clear and permanent. Eating, to say the obvious, is organic. In the real world, things are less separate than we usually imagine, and things become parts of other things.

It is not just that eating is a metaphor for Jesus and us. Jesus does say in this passage, “my flesh is really food and my blood is really drink” And he says elsewhere that we must eat and drink bread and wine which he says is his body and blood. But as far as understanding goes, these words are better than other words might be. They are a way to explain what is going on. It is not enough to believe something about Jesus. You have to devour him. To join in him in some way, which way we are not required to figure out exactly what. To have Jesus not only in our thoughts, but in our brains, our body, our being.

This discourse in John starts with the feeding of 5000 people with just a little bit of bread. Yet each of them were filled with, it says, as much as they wanted. They were satisfied. Jesus, especially in John, promises abundance. The people who stayed with Jesus by the end of this passage longed for that rich and satisfying life.

The ones who stayed were the twelve, meaning the twelve disciples. This is the first time in John that the disciples are described this way, as a band of twelve followers. The disciples were the ones who stayed in spite of Jesus’ difficult teaching. The rest went away. The disciples stayed not because they had the strongest stomachs. Not because they were the cleverest and most understanding thinkers. The ones who continued to follow Jesus were not the ones who understood things most clearly. They were the ones who had the strongest need for life. They were the ones who had the greatest hunger.

The Christian Quest and Getting to the Future

Text: Luke 17:11-19

A visitor to Faith Kitchen last week asked how we preserve faith in humanity. It was an odd question, since it seems to me that Faith Kitchen is a good example of human activity. People were feeding people. People who might otherwise be crabby with one another were getting along just fine. People who might have crossed to the other side of the road to avoid one another were sitting down to share a meal. This is loving your neighbor and also loving your enemy. It builds faith in humanity. So that’s what I told the visitor.

But that’s not what he meant. He wasn’t talking about the people at Faith Kitchen. Not about the people eating or the people cooking or the people who had brought food or the people serving food and cleaning up and organizing the meal. He wasn’t talking about the people who didn’t have much but were generous with their time.

He was talking about some other people. People who have a lot but who fail to share it with people who don’t. People who don’t even see hungry people, or don’t see people who live in substandard housing, or no houses, or who are sick and cannot get medical care. He was talking, as Mary mother of Jesus calls them, about people who are proud in the imagination of their hearts. Or, as another person translates it, people who are arrogant in attitude.

Don’t the events these days, he asked, make you despair about the world? How can so many people be so self-centered? How can they spare so little for others? How can fear or greed so consume them that they would let people go hungry and sick? In their personal and political decisions and in the words they speak, people have abandoned their neighbors. Why do you buy that which is not bread? asks the prophet Isaiah. I always thought he meant bread for ourselves. But maybe he means also bread for others. Why, the visitor asked, are people not buying bread for others? (And we are buying a lot of not-bread.) This is not a new question. The visitor knows that. Isaiah wrote a long time ago, and so did Luke, who quotes Mary’s song. Will things always be this way? Is there no hope for the world and its people?

There are lots of answers to this question. Like: many people are generous. Or like: that’s the way it always has been. Or like: we should be more giving. Or like: poor people are a lot better off now than in the time of Jesus.

But today I’d like to talk about whether there is a particular answer that Christians might give, based on their faith.

The passage in Luke’s Gospel is commonly called the Magnificat, after the Latin word translated “it magnifies,” which is what Mary says in the first verse. Mary was poor. She was young. She was a member of an oppressed people, the Jews in Palestine who were subject to Roman occupiers. When Mary hears that God has planned for her child to be a king, she figures that is pretty terrific. Kings are rarely born from peasants, then as now. God must have something really amazing planned. She sings a song, as others in the Bible sing when confronted with good news. She sings a song praising God’s intervention in the world.

At first, her song is all about Mary. God is good, but God is good to and for Mary. I am the God-magnifier, she says. God is doing great things for me, Mary. God is favoring me, Mary, just a lowly servant. The actor is God, but the beneficiary is Mary.

But gradually the song changes. Surely God is working through Mary, but the purpose of this work is to change the world. It is not just Mary, but Mary’s people that God cares about, she realizes. Those who are powerful, rich, and proud will be brought down, scattered, sent away with nothing. The arrogant of heart will lose their control over every thing. The hungry will finally be fed. The impoverished will finally share in the abundance that God provides. All of Israel will be saved. And even more than that, all of descendants of Abraham. And even more than that, all people.

What a great hymn. But when we read or hear verses like this, what are we supposed to do with them? Do they change the world for us in some way? Are we different after knowing them? Or are they just sentimental supports that make us feel good about God?

These are powerful words. Do the proud and greedy tremble when they hear them? Do the poor take heart? Or is it a false promise to the poor, who after all have heard words like this for at least 2000 years. Are they cheap comfort to the comfortable, who are thankful that God will take care of things and has let them off the hook? Do they mean anything at all? To us, they do.

The Christian life is a quest. Much of what we do, in worship, prayer and meditation, service, and study prepares us for this quest. It takes continuous and faithful practice and training to equip us, as many quests do. The quest has two parts. Two goals. Both goals are hard to achieve in the face of the world. The quest’s goals are not the same as the world’s goals. But they are in the world. They have to do with the world.

The first part of the quest is the quest for hopefulness. In this quest, we search for the conviction to say to the Faith Kitchen visitor that things will not always be bleak. We read in the Bible about resurrection, about a new Jerusalem, about a re-balancing of fortunes, about the spread of compassion to all people. And our quest is to believe that with all our hearts and to reflect that belief in all our actions. One thing we might mean when we say we believe in Jesus is that we believe with hope in the picture of the world that Jesus paints. When Mary sings so enthusiastically, she is overflowing with hopefulness. God is good.

And the second part of the quest is the quest for selflessness. In this quest, we search for a way of being that takes us out of the center of our own concern. We read in the Bible about humility and obedience, and we practice thanksgiving. We act as if, and sometimes it is true, to care for others more than ourselves, or at least as much as ourselves. Our quest is to put the community of humanity first. Be as a servant, Jesus says. Feed my sheep, Jesus says. Forgive those who harm you, Jesus says, seventy times seven times.

These two quests are connected. They are connected in the way that Mary connects them. The hoped-for world is about all people, but it is also about each of us in particular. The messed-up state of things is not good for anyone. Everyone will benefit from the world that we hope for. And, as Mary saw instantly, each person is a part of the world getting there. But our part hinges on selflessness. It does not work if each of us grabs all we can and ignores others.

Our quest as Christians is not to be better people. Or maybe it is sometimes, but that is not what Mary is talking about. This magnificent passage is not about what we should do. It is not a chore. It is not law. It is not commandments. It is instead about what we should hope for.

Our quest is not an easy one. That’s because hopefulness that is not sentimental and humility that is not cynical are things the world mocks.

Hopefulness and humility are Christian virtues. They are not worldly virtues. That’s the reason we who live in the world have to practice them. But they are not the cause of our faith but a result of it.

Mary sings not because people are so great, but because God is. To answer the visitor: yes, we have faith in humanity. Not because we trust in the goodness of people, but because we trust in God’s desire.