Electric Circuit Rider

Comments on John 6:24-35 and Ephesians 4:1-16 for Sunday August 2

Sometimes I wonder whether we can begin to understand this passage unless we are hungry. It’s so easy for those of us, who know where our next meal is coming from, to judge this crowd’s inability to understand the spiritual implications of the feeding of the 5,000. We say, patronizingly, “Of course, these people whom Jesus had fed the day before came back again looking for a free meal and they were put off because Jesus was trying to explain that they didn’t live by bread alone, but by the Word that comes from God.”

Methinks we spiritualize too much.

I think we should take seriously John Crossan’s contention that if the gospel is good news for the poor, than, at the very least, it is about bread.  If we take seriously the Ephesians’ emphasis on unity in Jesus Christ, then the communion table becomes not just a symbol of Christ’s presence, but a foretaste of that feast where everyone in the world has a place at the table and everyone is fed. It’s something we “see” just as clearly as the crowd saw the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 and yet we, like them, do not really believe.

A boy put his meager resources into the hands of Jesus and somehow it was enough. The Sign that Jesus talks about is the same Sign that we experience in those moments of unity when people come together and take care of each other.

There are moments people remember as miracles, of a sort:  the evening the violent thunderstorm blew down the street knocking out the electricity. Neighbors introduced themselves to each other as they moved tree limbs out of the road and patched damaged houses as best they could; the funeral that brought the estranged members of a family together and for a day or two the things that divided them didn’t seem nearly as big as the grief that united them. Common need, common effort, common humanity leads to a kind of communion that we only wish we could experience once in awhile at church.

Over and over again, people in these circumstances ask, “why can’t we always be like this? Indeed during those few horrible days in mid-September 2001 some people ventured that everything had changed. Republicans and Democrats sang together on the Capitol steps. Liberals hung out American flags and conservatives volunteered for community service. Communities responded to acts of hatred toward Moslems by forming protective rings around mosques.

Aid was distributed to those most directly affected by the destruction of the twin towers without regard to differences between CEO’s and janitors. When people come together in genuine community, the maldistribution of bread is no longer a problem.

“Give us this bread always” is a prayer for a world that is no longer afraid of itself; a world that is not fragmented, but centered in a common humanity or the Common Human Being – the One we all know and love; whose face we see in the face of our brother or our sister.

“Give us this bread always” is a prayer for a world that no longer is afraid of tomorrow –  that day when there will be no bread – that day, like the others we worry and worry about, never comes if we break bread together on our knees.

“Give us this bread always” is a prayer for a world that is no longer afraid of gods who makes distinctions based on creeds and rituals, but trusts in the God who gives gifts to us, not for our personal enrichment, but for the building up of the organic unity of humanity that Ephesians calls the Body of Christ.

We misunderstand this prayer if we think that once it is answered there is no longer any reason to pray, because the magic breadbox will supply our every need. We only truly pray this prayer if we pray it as Jesus taught us to say: “Give us this day, our daily bread”. It is in the constant renewal of our dependence upon God and in the constant renewal of community so imperfectly effected by the coming together of the Church around the Table – but effected none-th

Easter came and went and I was a little overwhelmed with all those end-of-the-year things we do in church. Didn’t get back to posting any blogs until after Pentecost. And then, when I did, the good folks who run this website treated me like a stranger - in other words, whenever I tried to log on, they kept telling me that they didn’t recognize my user name.
They still don’t the first time I try, but now at least they are sending me to a second log-in site that does recognize me. So, I’m back with a couple of new postings below!
Thanks for reading!!

The first reading this week tells us about David becoming King of Israel. We see the leaders of
Israel’s 12 tribes coming to David. These are proud and independent men. The warlords and tribal leaders of Afghanistan probably are the closest thing we have in this world to these tribal chieftains of Reuben, Zebulon, Naphtali and all the other tribes; men with hard eyes and strong arms and calculating minds. They are not men who are inclined to bow to anyone else. They are not men who give up their authority or their independence easily. Yet they are here today to tell David that they want him to be their king.

How did David become king?

He did not do it in any conventional way.

He was not born a king. He was born in Bethlehem, the last of a big family of boys. In a culture in which the first son inherited twice as much as the second, the best the kid at the end of a line of seven or eight could hope for was to work for one of his older brothers someday as a servant. So David was not born a king – quite the opposite. Neither was that other child born in Bethlehem 10 centuries later.

The other way men become kings is they conquer their subjects. From Genghis Khan to Napoleon, people of modest birth have risen to the heights because of their ability to conquer. David was certainly an uncommonly successful military leader, but these chieftains do not come to him because they have been beaten in battle. That is what is so remarkable about this moment. These tribal warlords are voluntarily surrendering their absolute power to David.

Why?

The Bible tells us that these chieftains say, “You are bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh.”

This means they could trust David to understand them. He was one of them. It also meant that David’s fellow feeling for his people gave him a finely tuned sense of justice. We know that David cared about the little guy. Before he became king, he was kind of a Robin Hood figure operating on the edges of Israel. He helped the Israelites capture iron smelting furnaces from the Philistines and gave the Israelites the same advantages both in swords and plowshares that the Philistines had. He also made sure the poor were taken care of, even if he had to “persuade” the rich to share their bounty.

One of the most important affirmations we make about Jesus is that he is “bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh.”

David’s concern for the little guy was part of his appeal. Like David, Jesus is Robin Hood. Jesus robs from the rich and gives to the poor during the offering. And that is not the only way He turns the world upside down. So, be careful about pledging Him your allegiance.

On the evening of
September 11, 2001, the church that I served at the time was full of members and neighbors who had found their way, mostly by word-of-mouth to a special worship service. I remember very little about what was said that night – just an overwhelming feeling of shock and grief.  I do remember, however, just as the service ended, that one of our members sitting in the front row, a good friend, raised her hand and asked, “Roger, can we sing ‘God Bless America?’”

I thought I could get out of it by pointing out that we don’t have “God bless America” in our hymnals, but she insisted that we could all sing the first verse from memory. She was right. We could and we did.

Now you may be wondering what kind of Godless liberal, freedom-hating, terrorist-loving preacher could possibly object to singing “God bless America”?

I don’t. I like hearing a recording of Kate Smith singing about how we are almost 100 million strong as much as the next person. But it just didn’t seem like the right song for that night in church.

It wasn’t the right song for that night because it’s bouncy, upbeat, confident tune just didn’t match the feeling of unbearable horror and sorrow that we felt that night. Admittedly, the repertoire of American patriotic music probably doesn’t offer a song that expresses sorrow. We are an upbeat, positive-thinking, optimistic nation, which is one of the great things about this land, but it also means that we have a hard time dealing with the fact that bad things sometimes happen in good countries.

We need a new David, the great song-writer of the bible, who could shout with joy at the victories the Lord gave him over his enemies, but who could also write the saddest songs in the world – one of which, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” was even sung from the cross. We need a patriot like David, who in our first reading this morning, laments Israel’s defeat in battle at the hands of its enemies, the loss of his best friend, Prince Jonathan, and of Jonathan’s father, King Saul.

We do not have any Davids in America. It’s almost as if tears are unpatriotic. The problem with that is that when patriots don’t know how to cry for their land and what has happened to it, they stop being human and when we stop being human as a nation, we start adding to the long, sad story of man’s inhumanity to man. One of the oldest and most universal insights of the collective wisdom of the world is that human beings never make good decisions when they are only using their heads or only using their hearts. Wisdom is the product of a deep and long conversation between the head and the heart.

That wisdom that combines both the head and the heart is known as “prudence”. “Prudence” has nothing to do with the kind of prudishness that the novelist John Le Carre’ once described as “the ability to spot a sin even before it happened.” Nor does it have anything to do with the over-cautiousness that we often associate with the word. Prudence Is the very practical, situation-based wisdom that chooses the right means to achieve a good end.

David was weeping for a king who was not prudent. Saul, the first king of Israel, is a representative of the mystery of human leadership. Why is it that it is often the leaders with the best credentials that make the worst failures? One only has to reflect on the fact that the three men who came in to the office of President of the United States with the best credentials – who were by far the best prepared to take the reins of leadership – were John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.

Saul had all the gifts that a king needed. He even looked like a king. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else. He was brave. He could be cunning. But he was not prudent. Like Richard Nixon, his paranoia got in his way. David was the bravest, most gifted and probably the most loyal of his military commanders, but Saul was jealous when the crowds shouted that Saul had slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands. So Saul plotted to do away with David.

Jonathan, the king’s son, loved David and warned him of his father’s plans. So David fled and lived as a kind of Robin Hood outlaw on the frontier between Israel and the land of the Philistines. Twice, David had a chance to kill Saul. David refused to harm Saul, because Saul was “The Lord’s Anointed” – in Hebrew, the Messiah.

David, too, as we heard a couple of weeks ago, had been anointed by the strange Gandolf-type figure, Samuel, when he was a little shepherd boy growing up in Bethlehem. He believed; everyone, including Jonathan, believed that David would be king someday. But David did not believe in taking history into his own hands. David was prudent. He would not achieve a good end by foul means. In doing so, he only added to his stature when he finally became king.

David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan and the defeat of the Israelite army at the hands of the Philistines is a model of prudence and shows us the path to prudence in public life. Because in his lament David recognizes the fact that bad things do happen to good countries. Especially when they are imprudent. Saul had, as I said, fired his best military commander. He had managed to go from being wildly popular to having really, really low approval ratings. He made a lot of bonehead decisions and never learned from them. He talked a lot about God; he was publicly pious, but he never understood that he was God’s servant, not the other way around.

That, in fact, is the essence of prudence, as we understand it in the Christian faith. We are God’s servants, not the other way around. Think for a moment about those three words, “God bless America”. An English teacher would tell you that sentence is imperative – and those who say it are being imperious. An English teacher would also point out that the sentence should have a comma after “God”. We are saying, “God, bless America!

That’s one of the reasons we don’t sing, “God bless America” in church. We are waiting for someone to write a song that begins, “America, bless God.”

Singing a song like that, of course, would require humility, another virtue that is seldom associated with patriotism in America. Raising the possibility that we might sometimes be wrong, as a nation, is almost grounds for a charge of treason.

In writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Julia Ward Howe was very sure that the Union armies were doing God’s work by inflicting God’s wrath on the slaveholding states of the Confederacy.

Lincoln was not so sure. Shortly after the embarrassing and costly Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln sat alone and wrote on a fragment of paper a few lines, that he probably kept for awhile, believe it or not, in that stovepipe hat that he wore. His secretary, John Hay, found it in his effects after Lincoln’s assassination and entitled it a Meditation of the Divine Will

“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.

In this present civil war it is quite possible that God purpose is something different from the purpose of either party . . . “