Pray, Believe, Live

A Sermon preached on August 9^th, Pentecost XI, at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33, Ephesians 4:25-5:2, John 6:35, 41-51

Andy Pickersgill recently posted an article on our congregation’s Facebook page entitled “Why I Am (Still) An Episcopalian”.[1] It’s well worth reading. One of the author’s arguments was that he values “how our exposition of scripture is not centered on the favorite passages of our preachers, but on the lectionary. Every week, God is allowed to speak into our lives through scripture that the Spirit has ordained we read, not through the strained vision of someone's pet theological peeve.” I agree – though when your Gospel passage comes from the same chapter of John for the third week running and you are confronted yet again with the image of Jesus as the bread of life, and you don’t just want to rehash last week’s sermon, you do begin to wonder what the Spirit was thinking!

So I’ve decide to talk about the Lord’s Prayer. No this is not my “strained vision” or my “pet theological peeve.” When I was reading both the Epistle and the Gospel I felt that they both inform and illustrate the Lord’s Prayer and that they are informed and better understood through the lens of that prayer. Neither Paul nor John have a version of the Lord’s Prayer in their writings. It only occurs in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels in slightly different versions, but I still hear echoes of the prayer when Paul tells his readers to “forgive one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32) or of course in Jesus repeated use of the image of bread – of life, from heaven – to describe himself and his gift to the world. So give me the benefit of the doubt on this one please.

The Lord’s Prayer is so important to us Anglicans that we use it at every single service in our Prayer Book. Both in Matthew and Luke, Jesus introduces the prayer with the words, “Pray then in this way” (Matthew 6:9) or “When you pray, say.” (Luke 11.2) As good Anglicans you all know the phrase “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi.” As we pray, so we believe, and (in the expanded version) so we live.” So too Jesus’ instructions are not just about a prayer, but about faith and action – as are the passages we heard read this morning.

Our Father who art in heaven

God is not some distant being, only to be approached with awe-filled reverence. Addressing God as Father, as Jesus refers to God both in “His” prayer and in the passage from John’s Gospel – the Father who sent me (John 6:45) – or as Paul does indirectly in Ephesians (5:1) when he says that we are all God’s beloved children, transforms our relationship. It becomes a relationship based on fully intentional and completely unconditional love. One newer translation of the Lord’s Prayer – from the New Zealand Prayer Book – begins “Loving God in whom is heaven.” Heaven is not some place far away and in the distant future. We are not addressing a distant, absent, disinterested God. We are addressing a God who is passionately interested in us and heaven is ours to have and to experience in that God when we partake of the living bread of God’s Son.

Hallowed be thy name

Later in John’s Gospel, as his Passion approaches, Jesus will call out “Father, glorify your name!" and a voice from heaven will say, "I have glorified it, and will glorify it again." (John 12:28) It is in and through and by following Jesus that we glorify and hallow God’s name. For as Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians (2:10): “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow,” Jesus is also the name of God.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

It is the Father’s will that we follow Jesus. That is what Jesus means when he refers to people being drawn by the Father to come to Jesus. (John 6:44) No one is excluded from this invitation – all shall all be taught by God and everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Jesus. (6:45) But we have to listen of course and so we pray that God’s will be done. In his version of the Lord’s Prayer, the Quaker writer Parker Palmer translates the second part of this petition as “let heaven and earth become one.” That is when God’s kingdom finally and fully comes. Until then and on the way to that fulfillment, we are called, in the words of the letter to the Ephesians, to bring a little of heaven to earth by becoming “imitators of God, as beloved children, and living in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” (5:1-2)

Give us this day our daily bread

We’ve heard plenty about bread this and the last two weeks. Of course we need physical bread and other food and drink to survive and a key part of God’s kingdom coming is making sure that the food and drink already available are justly and fairly shared. But the daily bread of this prayer and of Jesus’ teaching in John is more. It is bread from heaven, it is consumable love. In the words of the psalmist (Psalm 34:8) we are called to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us

In Parker Palmer’s version, paraphrasing the prophet Amos (5:24), this petition is beautifully translated as “let forgiveness flow like a river.” Forgiveness is at the core of Christianity. The Cross is love and forgiveness. In Ephesians (4:32) Paul reverses the order of the Lord’s Prayer to become “forgive one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you,” which makes the connection to Christ’s fragrant sacrifice on the cross all the more visible. Without forgiveness there is no access to the altar and to the bread of life. As Jesus says in Matthew (5:23-24) we must first be reconciled to our brother or sister before we can come to the altar.

Lead us not into temptation

There are lots of concrete temptations listed in Ephesians (4:25-29) for us to resist: Putting away falsehood, not letting the sun go down on our anger, not letting it possess us, not stealing, avoiding evil talk. Why these ones particularly? Because they destroy community and communion, they do not build up the body of Christ, the living temple of God’s Spirit that we are supposed to be, instead they endanger and weaken to. Most of all we pray to God to help us resist grieving the Holy Spirit of God by acting against all that the seal, the stamp that we received at Baptism stands for. 

But deliver us from evil.

Or in the translation of the New Zealand Prayer Book: “From the grip of all that is evil, free us.” As Paul tells the Christians in Rome (Romans 6:23), “the wages of sin – of evil – is death,” and it is death that we pray to be delivered from and that according to Jesus’ promise we are delivered from in him: “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51) The great thing is that the eternal life that Jesus promises us begins right now. Eternal life is the quality of life, it means sharing the inner life of Jesus, a life that is on offer at once to anyone who believes in him. It is a life that goes on after death. It is the life of the age to come, the kingdom to come that we pray for in Jesus’ prayer. This new life is the bread that Jesus gives for the life of the world. It is on offer every week here at his table. So come and be transformed to live in love, as Christ loved us and as he teaches us in the prayer we say in his name.  

Amen

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[1] http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Why-I-Am-Still-An-Episcopalian-Greg-Garrett-07-31-2015.html#.VcAMuw0PSxV.facebook

What is it?

A Sermon preached on August 2^nd, Pentecost X, at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a, Ephesians 4:1-16, John 6:24-35

If I had studied Hebrew at seminary, instead of Greek, I would have known long before our Bible Study last Wednesday what the word manna meant. No, not ‘bread’ – its literal meaning is “what is it?”  Only two months in to what will be a 40 year trek through the wilderness and the Israelites were already complaining of hunger and near starvation. So the Lord promises to Moses, “I am going to rain bread from heaven.” (Exodus 16:4) But when the Israelites first saw the “fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground,” “they said to one another, ‘manna,’ or ‘what is it?’” (Ex. 16:14-15) Probably followed by, can we really eat it or what does it taste like? But of course they do soon eat it as they are starving!

In this morning’s Gospel passage the people who follow Jesus around the lake also have a lot of questions. When did you come here? What must we do? What sign will you give? What is this bread of heaven, bread of God, or bread of life that you promise us? And implicitly, who are you? 

Although they don't really understand why, they are instinctively drawn to Jesus as the answer to their questions and deeper desires, to the one they really need, much more than any physical bread which perishes and does not fill for long as Jesus tries to explain to them: "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” (John 6:26-27) 

But, as we will hear over the next weeks as we continue to work through this chapter of John’s Gospel, they were not yet hungry enough to actually try the food Jesus had to offer, they did not go beyond their questions, they were unable to recognize and believe in the one whom God had sent, and so did not know Jesus, the bread of life, although they would have never known hunger or thirst again. What they have in common with so many people today is that the God-shaped space everyone has within them, made as we are in God’s image, remained and remains unfilled. 

And unfortunately when we do not acknowledge what we are really looking for, or when we actively ignore or refuse it, that space, that hole gnaws and nags at us; it becomes an aching emptiness that we desperately try and fill with something else. We look to alcohol or drugs, to wealth or success, to power, privilege or sex or even violence to satisfy the deep hunger, the hunger of our hearts. 

But these false alternatives do not really work and they certainly do not last – their effect perishes or wears out – and soon we are looking for more, and find ourselves on the path to addiction. One of the books that the Franciscan priest and author, Richard Rohr, has written, looks at the connection between the Twelve Step program used by AA, and the Gospel. Provocatively Rohr says that in some way we are all addicts, that “human beings are addictive by nature.” Addiction, he says, is just “a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin,” and mediaeval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.”[1] He describes the process as follows: “Addicts develop a love and trust relationship with a substance or compulsion of some kind. ... It is a momentary intensity passing for the intimacy they really want, and it is always quickly over.”[2]   

Addiction really is not just about something physical or chemical.  Listening to the story of King David, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite this and last week, (2 Samuel) I can’t help but feel that David was addicted to power and to sex – and as is the case with addictions it nearly drove him to destruction, and caused great harm to many people, before he was able to admit to God, to himself, and to Nathan that he had gone wrong. In their search for fulfillment and meaning the young men and women who join IS become addicted to violence, power, and to a false glory. And we can become addicted to much less violent things too - to the past, to a particular way of doing things, to a narrative in which we were always and absolutely right and others were totally wrong … but these addictions or dependencies can be dangerous and destructive too. 

It’s worth looking at the Twelve Steps that the founders of AA developed and that many other organizations that combat addiction have adapted and use successfully, even if we do not accept the idea that we are all addicts, as they are good Christian spiritual practices. “Belief in a Power greater than ourselves” and “making a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him” are two of the steps, others emphasize the need for prayer, meditation as well as repentance, forgiveness and healing. “Nothing new happens without apology and forgiveness”[3] as Richard Rohr puts it. 

The first step in filling the God-shaped space within us is our decision to believe in the one whom God has sent (John 6:29) thereby allowing us to begin to be filled with the Spirit of God that, as Paul puts it, Christ has sent down to fill all things. (Ephesians 4.10). Filling the space within us is not a one-off process. It needs constant reaffirmation as we run into doubts and difficulties, at least I do. It is a process of growth and development – until, again in Paul’s words, “all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” (Eph. 4:13) 

Our decision to believe in the one whom God has sent allows to start leading a life worthy of the calling … with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” (4:1-2) Paul describes this process as something organic: “Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, … promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.” (4:16) Filling the God-shaped space is not the blind craving of an addiction, but the fulfillment of a basic need and element of our very being. Addiction causes harm – the sign of true fulfillment is harmony. Addiction is destructive both to ourselves and those around us, fulfillment is constructive as it builds up the body of Christ. Addiction is lonely and selfish, fulfillment is generous and sociable. Just as Paul uses the metaphors of the body and of mutual ministries to show us that fulfillment is meant to be in community, so Jesus uses the images of food and drink and of meals to describe what he offers, something that is both necessary for life, and most commonly shared.

Believing in the one whom God has sent is not a condition for our salvation, it is our salvation as the only true way of satisfying the hunger of our hearts and souls.

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." (John 6:35) Manna? What is it? I invite you to come to the Lord’s Table to eat the bread of heaven and drink from the cup of salvation and to find out for yourselves what it is and what it means.

Amen

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[1] Richard Rohr, Breathing under water, (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2011), xxii

[2] Ibid, 116

[3] Ibid, 49