Good Work

Text: James 2:1-17

Faith, not works. This is the motto of Protestant Christianity and especially of the Lutheran brand. Martin Luther popularized it. He took a remark made by Paul to the Romans specifically regarding Jewish and pagan Christians and expanded it. He took what was in many ways a political analysis and transformed it into a way of thinking about our personal relationship with God. The fruits of this were many, including the Reformation. And also a welcome emphasis on God’s grace and unconditional love for each person, no matter what.

To know that we are loved by God unconditionally is very comforting. God does not try to persuade us to be good through guilt and shame. God desires that we be joyful and at peace. All this makes us feel good.

But it can also make us a little queasy. As Robin said last week, there is a danger of turning God into what I think he called a kindly uncle. Someone who loves us, and is occasionally amused by us, but who is not really engaged with us or our real lives. Someone who can be easily forgiving because he lives far away. And who has little stake in us or our world. It is an unconditional love that comes from low expectations.

This is not quite what Luther intended. Luther feared that the world—and the church in particular—were depending on their actions to gain God’s favor. People thought—and were taught—that they had to earn God’s love through acts of service and piety. Such a thing was both impossible and unnecessary. And being unable to be perfect meant that God could not love us and we would be cursed.

The tendency to think this way was so strong that Luther had to speak strongly against it. There was no wiggle room here. As soon as there is one thing that you have to do to earn God’s love, the whole thing falls apart. That’s why Lutherans in particular are so adamant about the primacy of God’s grace, which is liberating. It is also why Luther so disliked the letter of James, our second reading today. Luther had a difficult and controversial point to make and didn’t want anyone weakening the argument with subtle details. Sort of like political speeches.

That was good for Luther and for our faith lives. But we know that God does have expectations and hopes for us. We know because God gives us commands. We have lots of hints about what God wants. Jesus tells us, among other ways. We know that there is something about a life a faith that requires or leads to a life of service. We know this in our bones. The motto “faith not works” can make us queasy because we have a deep-seated conviction that James was right. Faith without works is dead.

What good is it, James asks, if we pat someone on the head—“there, there”—and offer them words of blessings and do nothing to supply their physical needs? If they have no home and are hungry and we do nothing, what is the good of that? Some—maybe. Not much.

James is not talking here about our own worth or character. This has nothing to do with our goodness. Or generosity. This has nothing to do with the goodness of the deed. The phrase he uses—what is the good of that—means “how effective is that?” or “what can that accomplish?” Good as in “what good are chopsticks for eating soup?” “What good is a tax credit for someone who has no income?” James is asking not a moral question but a practical one. It is not about currying God’s favor or responding gratefully to God’s good gifts.

Yet it does have to do with our life in faith. Helping others bodily is one sign of our Christianity. Our love for others—friends and enemies both—is a response to the commandments, and example, and teachings, of Jesus. It is one way that people know we follow Jesus. It is how we are taught by Jesus to live out the life we have received through the grace of God. So James’s doubts when he asks his readers whether they “really believe in our gracious Lord Jesus Christ” come from how they treat others.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The royal law, as James calls it. Central to Christians and Jews and people of many faiths. The summary of the law according to Jesus, equal to the command to love God. The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And illustrated in the life of Christ.

And easily breached, easily violated, in actions both cosmic and trivial.

A person walks into the assembly—a synagogue, it says, but for us, let’s say a church. The person is rich, well-dressed, and everyone is kind and welcoming. Another person arrives. A poor and disheveled person. And everyone is polite (or not so polite) and cautious. “Are you lost? Can I help you?” The rich person is honored, respected, given the benefit of the doubt for no good reason. The poor person is dishonored, disregarded at best, treated with suspicion for no good reason.

James tells this story because it is a good example of a larger problem. The example is good one for the poor—most of his readers were poor—because they can easily recognize the event and the injustice in it. They are those whom the rich have oppressed, as James reminds them, the ones whom the rich have dragged into court. It is good for the rich because they need to be reminded to see the injustice and the suffering. For the rich and the poor, this is business as usual. But for the poor, it is a bad business, as usual.

If the royal law is to love your neighbor as yourself, what is royal evil? Not to hate your neighbor—though that’s not so great either. If the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor, then according to James, the greatest evil is to deny that another is your neighbor. When we make distinctions between those who are our neighbors and therefore call us to be obedient to the royal commandment and those who are not neighbors and therefore let us off the hook, we succumb to evil thoughts. Making distinctions between us and others that God would not make is a sin.

If you show partiality, James says, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. Being partial to one group—people like us, mostly—over the other—other disturbing people, for example—is not just a social faux pas, or something to dismiss with snide jokes, and certainly nothing on which to base policy. This is not something to take lightly. Though this is not a matter of our salvation or whether God loves us, it is a very serious deal. It is as OK to do this, James writes, as it is to commit adultery or to murder someone. That is, it is not OK at all.

We think that making distinctions based on all the things we use to make distinctions—wealth, style, education, smarts, race, culture—is scientific. That is, that is is based on observations of physical facts. This person really is wealthier than this other person. This person really is smarter. This person really parties differently. But scales like these are infinite and arbitrary. Everybody really is different from other people in hundreds of ways. But the things we pick to pay attention to are things that we pick. Making distinctions therefore is a moral decision, an act of morality. It is a action of the soul.

The question James asks at the top of these reading: with your acts of favoritism do you really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? is not a question in the original. It is a command, in the imperative. It says more exactly but more awkwardly: don’t hold your faith in Jesus while being partial to one over the other. That is, in your faith, don’t make those distinctions just as Jesus did not make them. You do not have the authority to pick and choose who you neighbor is. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Act accordingly. Faith with works is a living faith.

Staying and Going

Text: Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Other texts: John 6:51-66

[Last week and this week we heard the same passage from the Gospel of John. Today’s remarks carry on from last week’s.

Last week we heard that Martin Luther considered Holy Communion to be daily sustenance in the fight against evil. We talked then mostly about the sustenance part, and how the body and blood of Christ feeds a hunger that we all share. This week, we’ll talk more about the daily part. Last week we talked about how the followers of Jesus were put off by what he said, and many left. This week, we’ll talk more about those who remained.]

“Lord, to whom can we go?” asks Peter. Jesus has placed his disciples at a crossroads. Go one way, or go the other. Go with me, or don’t. To both those who left and those who stayed, their choice was the obvious correct one. For Peter and his eleven friends, the obvious choice was to stay with Jesus. We approve of that choice, which seems obvious to us, also. Peter’s words have become a part of Sunday worship in many Lutheran churches, where they introduce the Gospel reading. They are like a street sign that confirms that we are walking the same road that Peter and the disciples took.

But for Peter, choosing to go with Jesus was not like choosing the main street but taking instead the little dirt path off to the left. Following Jesus was unusual and risky. When Peter asks “to whom can we go,” the word he uses makes it clear that going to something implies going away from something else. “To whom shall we go from?” would be more accurate but more awkward. Peter gives up some other way of life to have a life with Jesus.

In this sense, Peter is not following Jesus so much as turning toward Jesus. Lord, to whom shall we turn? is more like it. It is a question of orientation. Changing direction. As Peter lives his life, which way will he be facing?

The same question is presented by Joshua to the Israelites. Make a choice, says Joshua, between God and the other gods. There are a lot of gods in the world, he says. Go with them or go with God. You can serve the Lord or you do not have to. It is up to you. Make your choice; follow whom you want. But as for me, Joshua famously says, as for me and my household, we will serve God.

The people answer: Far be it from us that we should forsake God for other gods. This is the answer to Joshua’s version of Peter’s question. For Joshua and his people, there is no other way to turn. This is God, who freed the people from slavery in Egypt, did great things, and protected them from all dangers. To whom else, we can hear them say, to whom else can we go? We will turn to face our God, they say. They declare: We too will serve the Lord. And yet, Joshua immediately tells them—in verses just beyond our reading—tells them they won’t. And he is right. As time goes on, they don’t.

Joshua is not condemning them, or invalidating their promise. Their promise, like Peter’s, is not some potion that makes other gods disappear or makes them less seductive. Their promise, and Peter’s, is a vow. Like a marriage vow, it binds people together in good times and in bad, in times of bliss and times of hardship. Sometimes it gets so bad that the promise is all that remains, for a while. A thread between two people, or between us and God. Joshua is validating their promise, praising its power against the powers of other inevitable attractions.

Following Jesus, being a Christian, is not a one-time decision but an ongoing and recurring one. The story of faith in the Bible is a story of good intent followed by betrayal, then revival followed by faithlessness. The choice placed before the people by Joshua—serve God!—is the same choice placed earlier by Moses—choose life!—and placed later by Jesus before the disciples.

It seems that the choice once made must be made again and again. We cannot just declare ourselves for Jesus once and be done with it. Peter, who here declares un-rivaled loyalty to Jesus later denies him.

Following Jesus is at best adopting a new way of life. To see things as Jesus seems to. To be a peacemaker, as Paul writes in the second reading today. To love one another. I am the way, Jesus said. The early Jesus movement was called the Way. It is a habit of existence more than a one-time statement of loyalty. It requires constant maintenance, nurtured not by our will to be good and true—which will always fail, as Joshua said of the Israelites—but by the spirit of God, and reminders of our promises, and the support of others. The same things that nurtured our spiritual ancestors.

This is the reason we repeat these same stories about God and humans. This is the reason why we share in the body and blood of Christ each Sunday. Why we gather each week to confess sins, pray, praise God, recite dogma. They are reminders. Our pattern of worship echoes the story of Joshua: gathering, re-hearing the word of God, responding, re-committing, going out again. We affirm the promises we made in baptism. We repeat the creed, and the Lord’s Prayer.

There will always be authorities and powers of evil, as Paul describes them. Competition for our souls. Ways of life. There are lots of other places to go, in spite of Peter’s proclamation. There will always be other gods. What they are for you, you’ll have to say for yourself. You know them.

Our task is not to destroy those gods. But rather to put them aside, to put them away as Joshua says. Out of sight and hearing. Not literally burying them, as Joshua meant—though that might work for some of the material gods that command our allegiance. But to turn our faces away from them. To turn to Jesus for guidance instead. To think: whom am I serving by doing this or that? Am I serving God? Whom am I following? I have made a vow to Christ. Is this thing that I am about to do in line with that vow? Am I still on the way?

Joshua and Peter are both rhetoricians, great public speakers, good politicians. They make it sound like choosing God over other gods, choosing to go to Jesus from some other way, requires nothing more than a good heart and firm resolve. But to describe what people do here is as choosing is misleading. We cannot keep a vow to always be true.

To follow Christ turns out to be not an act of will, but a willingness to make a risky promise. God offers us daily invitations to a new way of living. A new way of seeing. By declaring that we follow Jesus, we can make this vow: to accept those invitations—with the help of God and as much as we are able—one day at a time, again and again.

Not As Difficult

Text: John 6:51-69

There is a magical realism in the Gospel of John. It makes John both the most-loved and the least-liked of the four Gospels. Things happen in this Gospel that happen nowhere else. The most magical stories of Jesus are in John. The conversion of water to wine. The raising of his friend Lazarus from the dead. These are works of divinity. But also in John, Jesus is the most earthy and human. He is annoyed at his mother at the wedding at Cana, and he weeps before the tomb of Lazarus. John is full of seemingly opposing pairs: divine and human, light and dark, body and spirit, concrete and figurative.

What, then, are we to make of today’s passage about eating flesh and drinking blood? What is this? Is it metaphorical or literal? Is it magic or real? This teaching is difficult, so say the disciples, and two thousand years of Christians after them agree. Can we dismiss it—as often has been done—as fantastical? Just another one of those over-the-top things that Jesus says. In the category of turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, giving away all your money. Can we, as we sometimes do with the other difficult sayings of Jesus, domesticate it and change the subject?

There are a lot of weird things about Christianity, and this is one of the weirdest. On hearing this teaching, many of the followers of Jesus left him. “They no longer went about with him,” John writes. Only the twelve were left. His followers went from thousands surrounding him at the beginning of the chapter, wanting to make him king, to just a dozen. Yet for Christians in our day, eating flesh and drinking blood is central. The body of Christ, given for you, we say. The blood of Christ shed for you.

Martin Luther said of this passage that Jesus could not mean it literally. Surely he does not mean, Luther said, that one man should devour another. That seems right. Jesus does not follow this speech up with an offer to take a bite out of him right then and there. Luther also said that the passage was not about the Eucharist, about Holy Communion. We’ll talk in a minute about how, in spite of Luther’s opinion, it might have been.

But perhaps Luther was right. There is no mention of a meal here, no Lord’s Supper. The story does not take place before the crucifixion (as in the other Gospels), but rather after the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. The emphasis here is on life, and the life-giving properties of food and drink. What Jesus asks us to remember here is not the presence of Jesus in our midst, as in the Last Supper, but instead the provision of manna in the wilderness—the original bread from heaven—and that God provided nourishment for God’s people. In some way the physical body of Jesus is like that.

We are creatures that eat. We cannot create our own energy or substance. We steal them from other things—plants and other animals. As a consequence, we need to eat or we die. Eating and drinking are not optional. To compare our need for Jesus to our need for food is to say that Jesus is essential for human life.

Since we are creatures that eat, we are not our own. That is, what we eat becomes us, and we become in some small part what we eat. Its substance is our substance. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them, Jesus says (here and elsewhere). There is a kind of biology science going on here. In spite of John’s interest in the divine side of Jesus, Jesus nourishes us—according to this passage—not primarily in a spiritual way but in a physical way. How that works, it does not say.

The church—people, followers of Jesus—tries to make these theoretical words of Jesus practical. That is, if we are to follow Jesus about eating flesh and drinking blood, without actually gnawing—the earthy word that Jesus uses here—on his limbs, we must learn a way to do this that is physical, mundane, and convenient.

Which brings us to Holy Communion. In spite of Luther, the Eucharist is a possible way to interpret these words. And it may have been how the readers of John saw it. Because by the time John was written, followers of Jesus had been sharing the Lord’s Supper for decades. Using the words we use every Sunday—called the words of institution—that come from Paul, who wrote his letters long before John wrote his story of Jesus.

When we eat the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion, we honor and obey the words of Jesus spoken both at the Last Supper and here in John. We eat bread and wine. How this becomes body and blood, no one can say. Or at least, no Lutherans can say. There has long been a theological debate about this, but Luther said we should leave all that to the philosophers. It is interesting but neither urgent nor important. “This is my body” Jesus said; and Luther said that was all we need to know.

Luther also said that the bread and wine as body and blood of Christ was essential nourishment, needed daily (“given,” he said, “as a daily pasture and sustenance”) to get the strength to fight the devil. It is food. God gives us this food of Jesus to sustain us.

Our worries about this strange thing that is happening with body and blood and bread and wine turn out to be unfounded in practice. At least in practice among Christians. We do not judge it theologically but instead from our own experience. There is something physical going on and something mystical. We feel it when we share Holy Communion. Something of the flesh and something of the spirit. In our experience, the sacrament is effective. That is, it has a real effect.

We come forward to the altar, we kneel, we eat bread—hearing the words “the body of Christ given for you”—and we drink wine—hearing the words “the blood of Christ shed for you”—and we return, some to quiet prayer, and eventually sent out thankfully into the world—“go in peace, serve the Lord.”

None of us has to do this. None of us has to be here. We are here because we know that we need to be nourished and because we have found ourselves nourished here. The sacrament works for us.

The difficulty imagined by the disciples (and by us) turns out to be exaggerated. The uneasiness that we feel regarding these words in John is in fact not carried over into its effect in the Lord’s Supper. We might feel Holy Communion to be powerful, mysterious, comforting. But the weirdness that people sometimes find in it, though understandable, is at odds with our own personal experiences. Many of the followers of Jesus left after Jesus spoke these words. But twelve did not. We are heirs of those twelve who did not.

Christianity is based on the conviction that God became incarnate—literally, made into meat, into flesh—in the person of Jesus. We share with Jesus flesh and blood, life and spirit. Our whole self hungers for food in order to live. When we eat the body and blood, the bread and wine, it is as real as hunger is, and as magical as life is.

Duty and Joy

Text: Ephesians 4:25–5:2

As we begin the prayer of great thanksgiving every Sunday, we recite a portion called the preface. The preface varies with the season, but it always starts with our proclaiming that it is our duty and our joy to praise and thank God. This phrase, “our duty and our joy,” was a new addition, added in 2006 when the current hymnal was published. Before that, we said “it is salutary,” a word that means “of some benefit,” which was less specific and also less edgy.

It was a good update. Duty and joy are semi-old-fashioned words that together are the heart of Christian action. Their interplay is a constant theme of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and especially the passage we just heard. The words belong together. Without the other, each becomes flat and weak. Duty without joy becomes mere obligation. Joy without duty becomes mere sentimentality.

This letter, probably not written by Paul—but let’s call him Paul anyway—this letter does what Paul’s other letters often do: tells people how to behave. These letters to the churches reveal problems when they propose solutions. There is no point in telling people to change their ways if their way is just fine.

What is the problem in Ephesus? Imagine a world in which people remain angry with one another all the time and criticize each other. Where they speak evil of others. A world in which people are bitter, and quarrel with and slander others. It is not hard to imagine such a world because this is the world we live in now. We are, sadly, not surprised. This is how things work. We are old hands at letting the devil in, as Paul describes it.

But this is neither how things should be nor the way they have to be. For Christians, Paul writes, there is an alternative way to live. And the letter to the Ephesians is like a user guide to that life, written to people who claim to follow Jesus. The Christian identity of the readers brackets these verses, explaining at the first why we should behave the way Paul says and explaining at the end how we can go about doing that.

For starters, we are all members of one another. We are part of one body, the body of Christ as Paul put it a few verses back. We are all members of one organic system, working together, in different parts. The parts must tell the truth to each other. If we are one body, we cannot by definition do otherwise. If we do otherwise, we are not one body. Falsehood breaks the connections between people, and nothing works as it should.

This is making room for the devil: To consider ourselves to be unconnected, or not importantly connected, to other people. To mock relationships that center on love and to glamorize relationships that honor competitive and warring enemies. To see ourselves as independent, not interdependent. Otherwise, like a physical body, humanity will be weak and ill.

Once we become followers of Jesus, we are part of a new way of being, Paul says. A better way. We are no longer alone. We cannot act as if we were alone. Our decisions are not made by us alone, and we do not make decisions for ourselves alone. What we do is affected by and affects others. Do not steal, Paul writes, not because stealing is wrong in the abstract, but because otherwise one could be providing for others in need. Do not speak evil, because otherwise one could be giving grace to others. It is an opportunity thrown away.

The instructions in these verses are not achievements to be accomplished. Nor are they simply marks or identifiers of a Christian life. They are duties to be performed. They are things we must do, and we must do them because we follow Jesus.

We are to heed Paul’s instructions because it is our duty. This is not a question of merit (we are not better persons because of it), and it is not a question of salvation (God will not love us more or less). But just because we are saved by grace, or just because we know that we are loved unconditionally, does not mean that we are off the hook and should not judge ourselves. We should.

But we need to distinguish between judging and evaluating. It is clear, as someone pointed out in Bible study a few weeks ago, that God judges us. But judgment is not the same as an evaluation. God’s evaluation, we teach, is always positive. That does not mean God likes all the things we do. God seems to have goals for us—that are made clear in scripture passages like this or through the prophets or in the life and teachings of Jesus—but those goals are not the same as expectations. God is not disappointed in God’s children, whether or not we meet the goals.

The list of instructions in this passage is founded on three principles. First, that we tell the truth to one another. Second, that we rely on one another. And third, that we try to imitate God as revealed to us in Jesus. The instructions do not work if we ignore any one of these things.

We will not succeed if we lie to each other (or to ourselves, I imagine). Or, as a corollary, if we lie about each other (bearing false witness). We will not succeed if we try to live a good life without the help of others. And we will not succeed if we try to do this without God’s help and guidance.

Paul is not asking for superhuman efforts or results. He is not promising that we can transform the world all at once. This is not a miracle cure. He is not demanding purity, but an intentional effort to put aside, as he says, what is usually so compelling to us. No one claims that it is easy to put away bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, and all malice. Or to be kind to one another, tenderhearted, and forgiving. But it is our duty to, nonetheless. Paul is asking the Ephesians—that is, us—to remember that they have become new people. And that in calling ourselves Christians we have made a commitment to being new people who are trying to live a new way for the sake of a new world.

Practically, we are likely to act the same old way and for the same old reasons. But Paul’s manual says that—even so—when we make decisions, when we act, when we speak, we must be mindful of the instructions that we have heard. And we must ask ourselves: am I speaking, acting, deciding for good or evil, for life or death, out of malice or out of forgiveness. What am I thinking about?

When we become followers of Jesus, we adopt the view that a different way of living is possible. The conviction that this is so is the joy that blossoms out of this passage. Bitterness and malice do not have to be the way of things. We have signed up to be part of that project. It is our duty and our joy.

More Than We Thought

Text: Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21

Robert Pirsig in his classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance coins the term “gumption trap.” This is where you find yourself when you have seemingly exhausted all the ways to accomplish what you wanted to, and none have worked. You try the same thing over and over. Your thoughts are in a cul-de-sac. Your imagination is dead and but your frustration is lively. You have run out of gumption. He speaks about this when describing how to replace the bearings in his motorcycle engine. But the same thing applies to global problems, like economies in trouble, populations paralyzed by fear, widespread hunger and wealth inequity; local problems like companies (or churches) on the decline; personal problems relationships on the skids. Hard problems.

It applies to feeding a huge crowd of people when there is nowhere near enough food.

The feeding miracle that we heard about in the Gospel reading today is as much as miracle of imagination as it is a magical multiplication of fish and bread. The amazing part is as much the resolve of Jesus and the willingness of his disciples to join in as it is the resulting feast and the leftovers. This story is the only miracle that appears in all four Gospels. In none of the stories does the crowd see this as proof of the divinity of Jesus. In fact, only in John does the crowd react at all. For the disciples, Jesus has done something amazing and unexpected, but the eaters, it seems, are not impressed one way or the other. They started out hungry, and they ended up satisfied. Which seems to be the point. As often with Jesus, when there is suffering, Jesus is moved to relieve it. Even when to do so seems impossible.

The apostle Paul (or more likely someone writing under his name) addresses the church in Ephesus, which Paul founded. In the almost exact middle of the letter, he prays the prayer we heard today. These verses are a hinge in the letter. On one side, the beginning of the letter, it talks about who the Ephesians—and all followers of Jesus, us—who they are. And on the other side, the end of the letter, it talks about—in light of who the followers are—about what they should do. It is a hinge between being and doing, between character and ethics.

Paul prays, as it says redundantly in the original, that we may be filled with fullness and powered by power. The two ideas are related. It is Christ in us that lets us do the things that we must do. It is Christ dwelling in our hearts that enables us to do more than we would have otherwise imagined.

This is not about sentiment. Paul is not praying that we be filled with warm fuzzies about Jesus. The heart of which he speaks was not considered to be the seat of emotion, as it is now, but the center of thought, of rational thinking. Paul wants Jesus to be in the middle of our thinking machines, that we might think like Jesus.

This is the who-we-are part. As followers of Christ, as the Ephesians claimed to be, Jesus is fundamental to us. The one in which we are rooted and grounded. The roots from which we get our spiritual nourishment and the ground—meaning base, not dirt—on which we stand, which gives us our support, from which we push off.

Christ abides in us, as John would put it. As a result, we are capable of being moved as Jesus was moved, be fearless as Jesus was fearless, help those who suffer as Jesus helped. The result of Christ in us is that we have the power to do this. May you be strengthened in your inner being through the Spirit, Paul writes. This is the what-we-must-do part. Or maybe as Lutheran we want to say this is the what-we-can-do part. Our ethics, our response to the needs of others, emerges from this strength of Christ in us, and Christ’s voice.

In fact, it works backwards, too. Without Christ in us—when we stop thinking like Jesus—we easily fall into a gumption trap. Things seem too hard, too long, too far away. But through the power at work within us—within us—Paul says, God is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine.

But here’s the rub. This power is not a spell or potion or shield. The power is to think like Jesus. And what we know of the way that Jesus thinks is that he cares a lot about caring for others, about healing them, and about teaching them ways in which they can be free from fear and other obsessions.

It is amazing what Jesus does. Not so much that he fed 5000 people—though that is pretty amazing—but that all those people would find in Jesus so much hope and peace, and the conviction that he could nourish their being, that they would follow him around the countryside and up into the mountains even at the risk of going hungry. And not so much that Jesus would walk on water—though, again, pretty amazing—but that his disciples would go with him and trust him in the face of obvious danger.

The disciples gradually learn to think like Jesus, and the crowds want to. Jesus offers abundant life, a way of living that brings to us and to the world more than we can fathom.

God names us, Paul writes. Who we are—our character and characteristics—comes from God. God calls us. I cannot imagine that we will be able as Jesus did to walk on water or feed 5,000 people from a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread. Such things are unlikely to fix what ails the world anyway. But we are able—with the voice of Christ within us—to not be trapped into inaction out of despair. To feed the hungry that we can, to comfort those that we can who are frightened. Strengthened in our inner being, to respond to God’s call and to be as partners in the work of God’s kingdom.

To Lead is to Have Compassion

Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: 2 Sam 7:1-14a, Mark 6:30-34

There is a kind of restlessness in king David that makes him want to put God in a little house.

God objects. In all the years I’ve known you, God says to king David—and known the leaders who have come before you—have I ever asked you to build me a house? I have not lived in a house since the olden times in Egypt (and before that).

But David is uneasy, even when God reminds David of their mutual history. When David was a young boy in the fields, God chose him. God made him a great king over Israel. God vanquished Israel’s enemies by David’s hand, and created a place for Israel to be safe and to prosper. Yet David’s story has been one also of wandering, danger, and exile. God is with him now, but perhaps David is not sure whether God has always been so, and more to the point, whether God will always be. It may be that David is being generous to God in offering God a permanent temple. Or it may be that David just wants God securely and permanently nearby.

We share with David a legacy of Adam. Anxious restlessness and a sense of being beleaguered and urgent striving. We are creatures after the fall, knowing in the center of our beings that we are made for the better and wondering where sometimes—or often—where God is. We are missing something: peace of mind and peace among people, contentment, an ability to love without misgiving, knowing we are cared for and cared about.

Jesus looks at the crowds that increasingly surround him. Crowds of people, you get the impression from Mark’s reading, who are harassing him. He and his disciples need rest and food and some quiet time. But Jesus cannot turn away. The people come for healing, of course, and to see miracles. But it is not their illnesses that move Jesus in this passage. He has compassion on them, Mark says, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

It is this that draws the crowds to Jesus. It is more than healing, though I’m sure that was important. But healers then were a dime a dozen. It is the restlessness of David in them that responds to Jesus. The people see in Jesus someone whom they can trust to guide them as sheep trust their shepherd.

The twenty-third psalm is a treatise on our deepest needs and desires. It promises food for our bodies, and a break from our weariness. It promises water for our thirst, and peace in our busy-ness. It promises restoration of our souls and psyches.

Though it seems to celebrate God’s abundance, it more exactly celebrates God’s sufficiency. It promises not that all our hungers will be satisfied, but that we would be free from hunger. I shall not want, it says. The verb has no object. It does not say “I shall not want this or that.” It says, as it does here around the altar: I shall not lack. It says that wanting will no longer be a cause for worry. In that way, this is a psalm of grace. The promise frees us.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. The two phrases are joined without a conjunction because they each mean the same thing. Trust in the shepherd, and lacking nothing, describe one another. The sheep who trusts the shepherd does not worry. The sheep who does not worry can only so when trusting the shepherd. The guidance of the shepherd along the right paths is what makes the shepherd the good shepherd, the one to be trusted. It is the guidance we long for in our restlessness; the rest—the abundant life—follows.

The psalm is not a utopian vision. Grief and shadows of death are and will remain a part of our lives. The psalm does not promise to take us away from all that. It cannot, in this world. But it can weaken their power. I fear no evil, a word whose meaning here is more secular than cosmic. It is the evil and sorrow and suffering of the day to day whose presence remains but whose strength is obliterated.

It is God’s presence that makes this work. You are with me, the psalm says. These words are in the exact center of the psalm. With them the song changes from a description of the shepherd (he makes me, he leads me, he guides me) to an address to God (you set the table, you anoint, your goodness). It goes from a statement about God to one to God. From knowing about God to knowing God. From talking about a shepherd to having one.

The crowd of people in Mark long to be with Jesus because they are deprived somehow of the promise of the psalm. They have no shepherd. Jesus sees this. And because of this, Jesus has compassion on them. This is the other reason they are drawn in such great numbers to Jesus. They see he can be their shepherd. And they see he has compassion for them. This is not some mystical sensitivity; people are not easily fooled about others’ compassion for them. They know when it is bogus, an empty show.

Compassion means to suffer with, or to feel with. Like empathy. But more than that, because it is not something that can be done at a distance. It is not the same as pity. It is not intellectual or sentimental. The word that Mark uses means gut-wrenching. To be compassionate for someone means to hurt inside in body and soul. Jesus is compassionate because, just as God is in the psalm, Jesus is with the people. Compassion is like solidarity. One cannot be compassionate from a distance any more than one can be a shepherd from a distance.

Compassion is the heart of Mark’s Gospel and the heart of Jesus’ life. It is the “for us” that we say when we talk about the crucifixion plus the “with us” that we say when we talk about Emmanuel, the incarnation. It is a synonym and an implementation of the unconditional love that Jesus talks about. It is the center of the teachings of Jesus, the one whom we follow.

We seem to have lost our shepherd’s guidance. We seem to have been roped into becoming parties to an unfortunate agreement that the good life can come about through the means of violence and greed. That these evil forces can invisibly and magically yield good fruit, and if they have not yet, then they someday will. Compassion is an afterthought, a nice possible side-effect. But these are forces that, unlike compassion, operate most effectively at a distance. When near, they turn our stomach. We cannot easily endure in our bodies or our ethics the close-up suffering of others.

Our restlessness in the world can lead us to acquiesce to this deal. But it does not have to. We are made for better.

When we are baptized, as Miles just was, and when later we become part of a community of people who confess to following Jesus, we say we are born to a new life. One consequence of that life is that we become sheep of a sort, no longer deprived of the promise of the psalm. And as much as we are able, entrusting our fortunes to God, the Lord, our shepherd.

Going without Honor

Text: Mark 6:1-13
Other texts: Ezekiel 2:1-5

We are advised to set clear, measurable, and attainable goals. How else, we are asked, are we going to know whether we have accomplished what we set out to do? How do you know whether you have arrived if you do not know your destination? How can you plot the best path to get there? It is important to be effective and efficient, essential elements of productivity. If we set good goals, we say, we can mark and judge our actions, know when to cut our losses if necessary, quit while ahead, or optimize assets. This is good process for getting some kinds of things done.

But sometimes the goal is not the point. Sometimes the destination is not known to us. Sometimes we are called not to accomplish something but to be some way, or to be some place where we are needed for reasons mysterious to us and sometimes, but not always, eventually revealed to us.

Jesus returns to his hometown after assembling his team. He has been wildly successful. He has healed people, and cast out demons. Crowds have pressed around him, seeking his power. He has brought to life a child thought to be dead.

The people in his old neighborhood are astounded, Mark says. But not in a good way. Astounded as in “I don’t believe it!” They cannot believe that someone as ordinary and as without prospects as Jesus was could have done what he has. This is the Jesus the carpenter they know, one of Mary’s boys. They judge Jesus, taking offense our Bible says, but it really says they are scandalized.

Jesus seems puzzled, amazed by their disbelief, Mark says. But Jesus is not angry at the people. He is not judging them. Nor is he making excuses about his inability to do any deed of power (or just a few deeds, it turns out). He has not been thwarted in some project. His job is not to make people admire or trust him. Some people will, and some people will not.

Like a prophet, Jesus speaks for God. Whether people hear him is another thing altogether. He is not responsible for the hearing, just the speaking.

Jesus is not, as someone called him, a big ball of divine power walking around able to accomplish whatever he wants. In the Gospel of Mark, more so than in the other Gospels, Jesus is revealed over time, and there is a sense of Jesus gradually coming into his own. Jesus develops. We teach that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine. As the lives of humans unfold, so does the ministry of Jesus.

This episode with his hometown neighbors is a lesson to his disciples, whom Jesus immediately sends out in mission. He warns them, through this example, and then through words, that some will welcome them and some will not. It’s fine. Minister to those who receive you, Jesus tells them. Do not worry about those who do not. Your job is to be the person who offers healing and transformation.

In the past few weeks two young pastors have been called to build, more or less from scratch, two new churches in this area. One (who is actually a pastor in training) is Tiffany Chaney , who is working in Dorchester at the site of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. Her fledgling congregation is called The Intersection, a name that fits the geography of the site and also fits the intent of its mission. The intersection, as she says, of faith and life.

The other pastor is Ryan Lun, who was just ordained last month and is working with Good Shepherd Lutheran church in North Quincy. His congregation-to-be is called Good Neighbor Church, which fits his mission of serving the growing population of Chinese neighbors in Quincy.

Both of these pastors seem to me to be people of great courage. They have been sent out (two by two as it happens) called to act without the benefit of the kind of goals that we are taught to admire. They have a thankless job. I do not mean that people will not thank them or that they themselves are not grateful for these calls. But their job is to do stuff that may or may not lead to some outcome that they may or may not have imagined. They are being called as prophets are called, sent as disciples are sent. Not knowing the destination.

Prophecy is the intersection of life and faith, of humanity and the spirit. It is embodied in humans like Ezekiel. O mortal, the voice says to Ezekiel, meaning “son of Adam,” a phrase which appears over and over in this book. A son of Adam into whom a spirit has entered.

Prophets have no goals, or rather their goals are not theirs and not known. Prophets carry the divine word even though they themselves are merely human. Prophets are called not to enact or implement the future, but to state clearly the present, to envision what could come from what is now, and to speak for God.

Stand up! God tells Ezekiel. You shall speak for me It is not a sought-after job. Prophets are rarely called to successful ministry. They always work in rocky soil. The people of Israel were, our Bible says, impudent and stubborn. It says more exactly that they had hard faces and hard hearts. They are rebels who have rebelled against me, says God. God is not angry with them, any more than Jesus is angry at his neighbors. The Israelites are rebels now. God has told Ezekiel that it will be tough going. God sends Ezekiel anyway. What happens next is not the responsibility of Ezekiel.

We are called—pastor-to-be Tiffany and Pastor Ryan and you and me—we who follow Jesus are called to speak. To speak clearly and courageously as Jesus has taught us, about forgiveness and justice and overriding compassion.

We are sent as disciples to reveal God through our actions, conforming our lives to our faith. We do not have to measure our accomplishments. We do not have to find or follow the best path. This is not a time to judge whether what we are doing is effective or efficient. It is a time to stand up when called, to go out when sent.