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<\/a>Thanks to Kate Roberts for the wonderful photos.<\/p><\/div>\n
First to our Gospel reading.\u00a0 Jesus said to them, \u201cI am the bread of life.\u00a0 Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.\u201d\u00a0 I will be frank, the way Jesus speaks in John\u2019s Gospel annoys me.\u00a0 I find myself thinking that John\u2019s Jesus has a problem with tone, using ethereal, holy words that hover way above us, reminding us we are beneath him.\u00a0 The term \u201cimperious\u201d comes to mind.\u00a0 If I am not careful, I hear Jesus speaking of his mission as if he is the honor-bound head butler in a large British manor house.\u00a0 And this passage is one that I find particularly confusing.<\/p>\n
No hunger?\u00a0 No thirst?<\/p>\n
Christians have and continue to die from quite literal hunger and of lack of potable water.\u00a0\u00a0 It seems a bit weird and maybe cruel for Jesus to use the words \u201cbread,\u201d and \u201chunger,\u201d and \u201cthirst\u201d in so figurative a way that they seem way up here \u2013 not connecting to our vulnerable, mortal, food and water-dependent bodies.<\/p>\n
And, if we do shift upstairs to the realm of ideas, and go along with a more figurative, or symbolic meaning of hunger and thirst, isn\u2019t it the case that many Christians do crave<\/i> the shalom of God, the peace of God?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it the case that many people who come to Jesus and eat the bread of life at this table find our hearts transformed such that we hunger <\/i>for peace or thirst for justice?\u00a0 Don\u2019t some of us eat this bread of life and discover a new, physiological yearning for more Jesus right here, right now in places near and far?<\/p>\n
For a military drone to be transformed into a mother pelican.<\/p>\n
For a torn marriage to be stitched miraculously together again.<\/p>\n
For for a local bank whimsically to overflow with glittering cash for more milk and more honey.<\/p>\n
Truly, I don\u2019t think Jesus meant that if we come to him we will not be hungry, or thirsty, or else Jesus was a liar, or maybe mistaken.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t believe Jesus was a liar or mistaken.<\/p>\n
The passage about bodies and grace from Ephesians helps me to begin to say a word about what Jesus may have meant.\u00a0 \u201cBut each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ\u2019s gift.\u201d\u00a0 Each of us was given grace according to the measure <\/i>of Christ\u2019s gift.\u00a0 This word measure seems key.\u00a0 How does one reckon the measure of Christ\u2019s gift?\u00a0 The word \u201cmeasure\u201d comes up again, as Paul, the author of Ephesians, connects the different ways we are gifted and called with the \u201cmeasure of the full stature of Christ.\u201d\u00a0 Paul layers metaphors here, so bear with him.\u00a0 The brand baby new church in Ephesus, to whom he is writing, has as its working principal, or its very heart, the \u201cmeasure of Christ\u2019s gift.\u201d And so the \u201cwhole body\u201d that is their little church is \u201cjoined and knitted together by every ligament\u201d he says, through the \u201cmeasure of Christ\u2019s gift.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cApostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers,\u201d are formed together, joined and knitted into one body, and the organizing principal of their movement, or the DNA of their make-up as a body, is the infinite, never-exhausted grace that is Christ\u2019s gift.\u00a0 The central animating fact of the church as a body is immeasurable \u2013 not open to study (no matter who is funding it) or to counting or to managerial schemes or to a critical sense of there being not-enough.\u00a0 The church moves, according to Paul, in a way that is the opposite of austerity.<\/p>\n
Maybe it is from this place, from this incalculable fact of miraculous grace that, though we still find ourselves hungry, we are never totally alone.<\/p>\n
I find Paul\u2019s list of the different parts of the body here also helpful. \u00a0In 14 years of teaching seminarians, I have come to see that prophets are not always so keen to see the gifts of teachers.\u00a0 Teachers are known for parsing different particulars, describing the nuances of discipleship.\u00a0 Prophets would like a little less nuance and a lot more righteousness, thank you very much.\u00a0 And, truth be told, many teachers are not so keen on the annoyingly happy zeal of evangelists.\u00a0 And, pastors can be annoyed by apostles, as a pastor is called to sit still, right here, patient and over time, with one church, while apostles go out gallivanting across the church universal.<\/p>\n
Paul describes the body that is Jesus\u2019 church as connected and linked in grace, in such a way that we who are truly very dispositionally different from one another are awesomely stuck with one another, counter-intuitively connected together, re-membered in grace and \u00a0pulled together in something Paul calls love and that Jesus calls life.<\/p>\n
In our Gospel passage from John, Jesus tells us \u201cAnyone who comes to me I will never drive away.\u201d\u00a0 I think that this is connected to the ways that we will never, truly, ultimately, be alone with our distinct gifts and burdens.\u00a0 The hunger and thirst that is our mortal, yearning life can never ultimately isolate you, or me, leaving us dismembered from the body or cast out.\u00a0 And these two passages, read together, perhaps also testify to the fact that we can never ultimately hide ourselves away, with either our gifts or our struggles.\u00a0 We cannot sit alone, satiated, or starve ourselves from the sustenance that is the bread of Jesus.\u00a0 Could it be that, once we are pulled into the body of grace that is a church, we cannot sustain the spiritual anorexia of despair or the gluttony of lonely ambition?\u00a0 I am not totally sure, but Scripture inspires me to be more sure.<\/p>\n
I myself have felt utterly alone before, not only in a pew, but, truth be told, in a pulpit.\u00a0 But grace has, finally, come back drip by drip, almost like an IV, and I don\u2019t realize I have been linked back into the body until I am no longer so devastatingly parched.<\/p>\n
Kara, as a priest, it will be your gift to stand right here close by the bread of life \u2013 touching it with your mortal hands, watching up close as hungry people, like yourself, come forward and eat Jesus.\u00a0 It will be your task and gift to see and name the places where God is knitting God\u2019s people together, even when the body that is a congregation seems all unraveled and frayed.\u00a0 You will have the gloriously fun work of holy sleuthing, finding the places of God\u2019s holy suturing.\u00a0 Maybe think here also with the prophet Ezekiel, from whom St. Paul was borrowing.\u00a0 When the body of God\u2019s people seems hopelessly desiccated, you will dwell on and speak to a vision of bones snapping back together and of blood flowing from this hand over here to this other foot over here, even when this hand and this foot hardly seem part of the same body.\u00a0 This bread you will serve enters us, and in difficult as well as in blessedly complicated ways, we are not alone.<\/p>\n
In closing, I have to come back to our first reading, from Isaiah.\u00a0 I love the magical-and yet-worldly specificity of the passage you chose.\u00a0 Isaiah gives us the precise year in chronological time, the number of wings on the seraphs, and even where exactly they placed their wings.\u00a0 Isaiah\u2019s response to this vision of the Lord sitting on his throne is first to shout \u201cWoe is me!\u201d\u00a0 I think this is a very helpfully to-the-point passage for those of us called to be priests \u2013 for those of us called to have our mouths transformed through holy cauterization.<\/p>\n
Isaiah responds:<\/p>\n
\u201cWoe is me!\u00a0 I am lost.\u201d\u00a0 Check.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor I am a man of unclean lips.\u201d\u00a0 Check.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I live among a people of unclean lips!\u201d\u00a0 Definitely check and check.<\/p>\n
Yet.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 I have seen the Lord here in this temple, right here, with my faltering eyes, Isaiah tells us.\u00a0 And then, a flying seraph brings a live coal and tells Isaiah \u201cYour guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Your guilt has departed.\u00a0 Your sin is blotted out.\u00a0 My guilt has departed.\u00a0 My sin is blotted out.<\/p>\n