Sermon for August 22, 2021 - The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B, The Rev. Jeffrey W. Mello

Ignatian spirituality invites us to imagine ourselves in whatever scene the scripture we are reading presents. This is a practice with which I connect, as someone whose relationship with God and robust imagination go hand in hand.

Sometimes, we wonder who we are in a given scene.  At the nativity, am I Joseph? Mary?  The innkeeper?  At the cross am I John, the beloved disciple?  Am I the centurion?

In today’s passage from John, a continuation of the long “Bread of Life discourse” we have been reading, we might wonder if we are a disciple who leaves?  Are we Simon Peter?  Are we Jesus?

I have found that trying to choose one character with whom I most closely identify is often a mistake, for there is usually a bit of each of them in me.  Our scriptures are invitations to imagine how each character in the Word represents some piece of who we are when it comes to our relationship with God, or our journey to live our lives as followers of Jesus.

So it is with this reading from John.  Each character in the story opens their mouth and I hear them speak a truth from my own heart; they express a fear I don’t even know I have, ask a question I’m too afraid to speak aloud. They grapple with the hard stuff of faith on my behalf.

Some of Jesus’ followers hear Jesus talk about eating his flesh, drinking his blood, and living forever and call it quits.  When they say, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” I recognize a question I have asked in the privacy of my heart.

And I can imagine myself amongst the twelve disciples as Jesus turns to ask them if they, too, have had enough and plan to leave.  They respond, “To whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.”  I hear this and I remember the time in my life when I left the church, and the Spirit kept calling me back, over my objections, because the world could not offer me what God promised me.

And, pardon my hubris, but I listen to Jesus in this passage and I wonder what he is telling me about leading a community of faith and risking people walking away because the truth of what we have to say just might be too much for them.  I hear Jesus, and I pray I will always have the courage to say what God might have me say, trusting the Spirit, rather than avoiding what is hard, out of fear that some might say “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it,”  and walk away.

So I am like the disciples who cannot bear it anymore.  And I am like the disciples who have nowhere else to go, and I am like Jesus, loving a community enough to trust God to take care of us, even when some are struggling, some are overwhelmed, some are underwhelmed and all of us are just trying to meet the challenges of the day in front of us, striving to follow God’s Way of Love.

In a life of faith, the teachings that are difficult are legion.

The Creed presents challenges for some.  Scripture is full of stumbling blocks.  Even the unconditional love of God itself can be too much for some to grasp when they have been taught their whole lives that God’s love is earned, not freely given.

The world around us is filled with teachings that are difficult; hard to accept, prompting us to want to throw up our hands and walk away.

The news from Afghanistan is difficult; who can accept it?

Haiti; who can accept it?

A COVID variant brings new restrictions and angry, politicized public discourse.  Who can accept it? 

Wildfires, and floods, heatwaves and hurricanes; who can accept it?

Enter Jesus, who makes everything so much simpler, and so much more complicated;  so much easier, and so much more difficult.

Jesus responds to the disciples who are leaving, not with encouragement to stay.  He does not backpedal on what he has said.  He responds with a confirmation that if what they have heard that day is too much, they will never be able to accept what lies ahead.  

John tells us that Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe.  And I wonder, do I believe? What do I believe?  What does it mean to believe?

Many of us hear the word “believe” and we are hesitant to sign on the dotted line because we do not feel we can adequately prove what it is we are being asked to say we believe.

In Jesus’ time, long before the enlightenment, belief was closer to trust than it was to proof.  It was more about the relationship with the speaker than it was about independent corroboration of what the speaker had to say.

Belief, in Jesus’ day, was an affair of the heart as much as it was of the mind.

Jesus knew that there were those who did not trust him.  That some could not hear what he was saying because their hearts would not let them.  They could not accept what Jesus offered them because they had other ideas of what a relationship with God ought to be like.  And that’s not what Jesus was offering.

There are those in the crowd of our world right now who look around, and think that, because of the evidence to which they point, all this talk of a God of Love, of new life out of death, is just too much to accept.

And there are some in the crowd of our world who seem able to trust in a loving, life-giving God who brings life out of death, hope out of despair.

There are some in the crowd of our lives who can tell us stories of trying a million other things to make sense of the world, to control it, or numb it, to no avail.  They are the witnesses among us who point us toward God and say, “To whom else can we go?”

Can you imagine trusting God enough to hand over your heart?  Can you imagine handing your whole life over to a God who wants to love you into an agent of God’s grace and love for this world?

When you come to this table, when you receive the bread, do you want to know exactly what’s happening, or can you trust that whatever is happening, God is trying to fill you, from the inside out, with whatever you need to do the work God needs you to do.

God needs us.  God needs you.  Precisely because there are Haitis and Afghanistans, because there are heat waves and hurricanes, because there will be injustice and there will be oppression.  Until we can make this world fully into what God dreams for it to be, God will need us, need you, to look around and see opportunities for life where there seems to be only death.  To see hope where there is despair.  

And sometimes, of course, it will all feel too much.  We will want to throw our hands up and declare “this teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

Jesus reminds us that none of us are in this work alone.  He wasn’t, and neither are we. We are in this together, for the long haul.  

We have each other, and we have the promise that God is with us every step of the way.  And when the teaching is difficult; when the work leaves us exhausted, and empty, we can trust that Jesus longs to fill us, from the inside out; from head to toe with all the grace, love and hope we need, and more.

Believe it or not.

AMEN.  

© 2021 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello