Proper 16 : Communication and Human Unity: Part 4 of a series of sermons on Law, Love & Language

Proper 16: John 6:56-69

Simon Peter answered Jesus, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life".

The central message of the gospel is that in Jesus, God communicates himself to us. We are not offered a blueprint for a new society, an ideal community that we may or may not choose to realize; rather, the gospel mandate is that Jesus offers himself as the source of a new kind of society, as the source of personal relationships. We might even say that he provides a new mode of communication, one in which we can only recognize by participating in it. If we're feeling really bold, we might go on to say that Jesus is the coming of a new language, a language with which we can express ourselves to each other and to God. But that might be taking things a little too far, at least for the moment.

Let me return to the idea that in Jesus, God communicates himself to us. In today's gospel, Jesus says to the disciples, particularly those who have been listening to Jesus say things like "those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me" and who are now totally confused and ready to leave, Jesus says, "the words that i have spoken to you are spirit and life". Here we have what amounts to a curious connection between speaking and the receiving what Jesus calls, ‘spirit and life’. Now, had Jesus said something like, 'the words I have spoken are true and accurate', or 'interesting and radical' or even, 'worth remembering and reflecting on' then his place as a communicator of God might make a little more sense. He might be, in this light, telling us things about God, sharing information about how God acts or what we can do to follow God properly. Jesus does speak that way on many occasions; however, in his rather mystical statement about spirit and life, there seems to be something else at work, an untypical mode of communication.

If we understand communication as how we package up information and send it to someone else, like the sending of an email or letter, then it seems odd that what Jesus speaks of is words that are spirit and life, two concepts that don't seem easily sent via email, or, for at matter, through speech. We could say, and often we do say, that words are life-giving or that in a recent email, a friend communicated their courageous spirit; but in doing so, we are speaking metaphorically. We are also assuming we understood correctly whatever it is that the friend was trying to communicate. Jesus might be speaking this way in metaphor, and many of us might think that's fine; but i would like to suggest that something else is at work here, a deeper more profound sense of communication.

Communication, I want to argue, happens when we share a sign (be it a word, image or even symbol, like the peace sign or "the bird"), when we both simultaneously have it as meaningful. In other words, the words i speak are not the vehicle upon which I trundle a thought out of my head and into yours. So when I say "my sermon will be over soon", the way this counts as communication is that we all know what this means to us as a group of people who have been trained to speak and understand the English language. What we have in common - the English language - allows us to simultaneously have as a meaningful piece of communication, that my sermon will be over soon. For some, a feeling of relief might follow from such an understanding.

To think about communication in this way is to begin to see that we are linked with each other not only by what we do to each other by means of actions, or have done to ourselves by others but also by our communication with others. We are linked in that we share a language, that is, we share an entire symbolic universe with which we can just as easily identity a cat, and then go on talk about subprime mortgages (perhaps). This is not simply the exchange of information, but the sharing of something deeper, the sharing of a life.

"The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life", Jesus says to the disciples, and later St. Peter says to Jesus, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life". Combine this with the thrust of the message from the sixth chapter of St. John, that Jesus is a source of life by means of his humanity - his bodily existence - for his life is the divine life of God; when we consider what Jesus offers and how, and what this communicates - God's life of love and friendship - we might be more willing to see how Jesus really is the coming of a new language, a new medium of expression with which we express ourselves. What he communicates is God's life and spirit, not as a piece of information to be considered and then discarded, but as communication by means of human signs - verbal, visual, in other words, by means of his body. What it means to share in this spirit and life as sourced in Jesus, is a matter of how our own lives communicate Christ’s spirit and life in how we live, who we love, what we desire, and whom we choose to help.

But it goes deeper still, for in sharing God's language in Jesus, we share in the same source of love and friendship that defines Christ's life, his death, and his being raised from the dead. In belonging to Christ, we discover our unity, we discover, that is, that what binds us together is that we live by the same life, the life of Christ. Saying this is going beyond saying that we all share an idea of Jesus, or that we all have the same information about Jesus or the one he calls, Father; to have the life of Christ as the source of our unity, is to say that we belong to what Christians call 'the Kingdom of God' because our human life is linked with the risen body of Christ; the very body we receive in the sacrament of the Eucharist. 

As members of the body of Christ, we learn to speak through our lives the life and spirit that Jesus communicates to the world. We confess, like St. Peter, that we have nowhere else to go, for we do not know how else to be human except by means of God's life in us, his communication of love and friendship in Jesus. More than words, even more than what human symbols can grasp, the language of God in Christ is how we become a truly human community, a unity of spirit and life that cannot be silenced. In other words, it is good news.

Proper 15: Communication and Being Together - Part Three of a series of sermons on Law, Love & Language

Proper 15: John 6:51-58

Jesus said, those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and i will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink

If you are hearing our verses from John's gospel for the first time, being sick might be the natural response, what with all the eating flesh and drinking blood references. Christians are quick to claim that what Jesus is getting at is something "symbolic" and not the actual cannibalism that jumps off the page at you. We say, roughly speaking, that Jesus' reference to his body and blood are understood in light of the story of Israel's covenant experiences with God. So, in the symbolism of the wine of communion we have the covenant significance of the blood that was sprinkled over the people as the ratification of the covenant that we read about in Exodus 24. It is in this that Israel recognizes the establishment or restoration of the covenant between humanity and God. The symbolism of the bread of communion brings us to the formation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai, the restoration of the relationship between people which is the communion aspect of our actions. Bread and wine, body and blood, communion with God, communion with each other, it all seems like good poetry or if nothing else, strange eating habits.

The language of communion is central to Jesus' message in the 6th chapter of John. Communion, in the sense of 'being together', and what we would later use to refer to the actions of sharing in the bread and wine in church, is an unavoidable concept in the gospel. "Whoever eats me will live because of me", Jesus says to the crowd. It is the sense of communion as 'being together' that strikes me as almost mysterious as the bread and wine being for us, Christ's body and blood. This morning, I would like to take a few moments to reflect on what 'being together' might mean.

The place to begin is with our bodies. We all have them, which is great. What role do they play in togetherness? Well, we might say that our bodies are normally experienced as a medium of communication. That is, at a very basic level, our place in the world and the first way we occupy space with people, rocks and turnips is in being a physical being. Before we can speak, and even later when we can use Twitter or telephones, our body is the source of communication. We are present to each other in the very fact that we are alive in the flesh. Someone without a physical body can only be absent from us—this is what bereavement means. To be present to another person we have either to be in the same place, where we can see and hear and touch each other, or else to be linked indirectly by some means involving our bodies, by a phone call or an email.

So, the first thing to say is that 'belonging together' begins with having a body. But, of course, communication can be good and bad, for we can just as easily praise someone as we can ridicule them. What we communicate as living bodies is the next thing to consider. Here we can consider the crudest of communications like hitting someone, but also the more complicated forms of communication like love and friendship. We can maintain love and friendship from a distance (unlike hitting someone) , but when our beloved is away for too long we desire more direct forms of presence. It's really hard to truly love someone without literally being with them. Human love and friendship are parts of our bodily life. Unfortunately, so is hitting someone or the use of unmanned attack drones. But these I will leave alone today. For what it's worth, I understand friendship and love to be the definition of life lived as creatures of a living God, and unmanned attack drones as signs of sin and death; both requiring the human body, but only one reflects our divine purpose.

Back to 'being together'. In sum, it requires human bodies being present to each other, communicating in their presence and by means of acts of friendship and love, something of God's plan for us. The last part about God's plan I tacked on, not simply to make this whole idea of togetherness sound religious, but in anticipation of what comes next. Communion, being together, is not just a fun way to pass time, but is, in fact, the way God desires for us to live. We are created social animals, and we learn what it means to live humanly well in contact with each other, being present to each other, as living bodies.

Now, when we consider that being together is bodily and includes the possibility of friendship and love, we are more prepared, i think, to hear Jesus' words about his body being the source of life. It is Christ's body and blood that establishes the people of God. We become one people – a holy people, a just people - in so far as our bodies are linked with Christ’s. The gospel seems clear: since Christ is the Word made flesh, and since he was bodily raised on the third day, it is only possible to be present to him in a human way by physical bodily presence. If Christ were not a living body he would be humanly absent from us, if he were dead we could remember him but we could not be in his human presence. It is precisely because he is raised from the dead that he is with us, and being with us, he offers his body as how we commune with God.

All the talk of eating flesh and drink blood takes our normal practice of eating food for our sustenance and indeed, life, and links that action with our sharing in Christ's life, his divinely human and humanly divine body as food and drink for our transformation, our healing, and our redemption. In his body, we are made present to God, and present to each other in a way that goes far deeper than what is possible in our own bodily life. We might even say that our desire to be together, to share our life with others, becomes actual in so far as we are linked with Christ's humanity. By his glorified body that we share in through the bread and wine of communion, that we encounter in the face of the stranger, who we hear in the Scriptures proclaimed, and who we feed when we do so with the hungry, community is created. Christ is not some ghostly spiritual aberration who haunts our private souls; Christ is the wounded, murdered, and raised Son of God who is present to us and in whose life, we can be present to each other in friendship and love.

The kind of communion that I’m speaking of is, in the Christian vision of the world, what makes our gathering as God's people to be a sign of true human togetherness. I don't mean that our being together is utopia, some fantasy where everyone gets along and is nice to each other. Sharing a common life, being with others, is what it means for us to be human. Nevertheless, we often settle for something less human, even sometimes inhumane, when our commitments to each other resemble a financial transaction (I’ll only be with you if you give me what i want) or worse, domination, whereby the real concern is with who has power and who is in control. When the church lacks the signs of belonging to one other, then the presence of Christ is diminished, his humanity absent. We become, as it were, something less than truly human.

It is because our bodies are united with the risen body of Christ that we have eternal life, the life of God. As those who belong together in Christ, our bodies, as our source of communication in the world, are strengthened to act with love and friendship even in the midst of all the inhumane ways of greed, violence and domination that defines so much of our society, even our relationships. What we offer is not bland spiritual guidance or holy platitudes; what we offer is what Christ offered: his life for the sake of the world. We offer, that is, our bodies to be a source of healing and love for others. In such acts, we display what it means to belong to Christ, to share in his body, to live present to God and each other. In being together, we learn what it means to abide in Christ.

Proper 14: Understanding and Love - Part Two of a series of sermons on Law, Love & Language

Proper 14: John 6:35, 41-51 (Understanding and Love)

Jesus said everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me - John 6:45b
The Olympics this past week provided an opportunity to watch sports that I would normally pass, if given the choice. Women's Beach volleyball, for instance, was in great demand, if the focus by NBC on this sport was to be trusted. And then there was diving. Watching the divers, i found myself admiring their skill as they launched themselves into the air. The commentators on NBC were also paying a great deal of attention to the skill of the divers. But whereas I used terms like "lovely", "marvelous" and other expressions of value, the commentators used a whole other set of descriptions, like: diving flight, riding the board, crow hop, armstand, and rip entry; expressions more  accurate to what the divers had actually done, or not done.

While I, the ignorant amateur, used the only descriptions I could - descriptions that expressed some general appreciation of the diver's activity - the commentators expressed something closer to what we might call, knowledge or understanding, judgments that the divers themselves would recognize as giving account of their actions: from the smallest detail to the largest. My opinion might have been welcomed, but the commentator's description would have been trusted. They have a better idea of what is actually going on. So, when they said a dive was good or a dive was bad, I might disagree in how it made me feel, but I would need a lot more training in the art of diving to disagree as to the goodness or truth of the dive itself. In other words, I would need to acquire a great deal more understanding.

I am no diver, obviously, but I know that if i was to ever acquire a true understanding of diving that I would need something more than a Google search on diving terms. For this is what I did after watching the diving one evening. To dive well, to understand diving as a skill and craft, I would need training, not Wikipedia. Whenever we come to a new arena of learning, be it diving or algebra or pottery, we may begin with training manuals and teachers, but we do not acquire the skills we need by reading books or listening to the teachers, but by practicing in accordance with their teaching.  Practicing has a twofold effect on our understanding: we acquire a sensitivity and insight into the demands of the activity at hand, and, simultaneously, become more attracted to dealing with it in the best way. As you get better at diving or algebra or pottery you become more enthusiastic about the activity. We become as it were, closely aligned with what we are doing, knowing better than before, how to do it well. We may even come to love what we do.

I should add here that teaching and training go along with learning the activity for oneself. The point I wish to stress is this: as the skill of diving or pottery becomes ours, and not simply that of the teachers, the understanding of what is be done, and how to do it, becomes an expression of our freedom to seek and strive for what is best, what is good and true. This is the stuff of knowledge.

I mentioned earlier that my initial response to watching the diving was expressions of value, like 'marvelous', amazing' and the like. My use of such terms demonstrate that while I know how such terms function in the English language, my understanding of the activity and the people involved was pretty paltry. I lacked knowledge. Now i suppose it is good to be self-aware of such things, especially when we consider how much easier it is to make judgments about activities or people with only value expressions at our use. We see images via the news, and we deem it "wonderful' or 'awful', depending on the kind of images; we hear politicians define policy, and we declare, 'now that's good for the middle class', or 'God protect us from this so-and-so'. We do this all the time, so much that it seems as though our interpretation of events or people is really the same - in our our estimation - as proper knowledge and understanding. Which, for the most part, it isn’t. It is common place in our culture to miss the difference between expressing an opinion, and speaking from within understanding.

Politics is not the only place where what passes as value expressions and what constitutes something closer to knowledge is at stake. For instance, questions of understanding are central to the developing argument in John's gospel regarding the identity of Jesus. What might it mean for us to know Jesus, to have the kind of understanding - the skill, if you will - to follow him? The crowds in the reading are quite offended by Jesus, stating that the local boy cannot be anything more than just that, the wonder-working neighbor from down the street. In our own day, if Jesus is considered at all it is often as an exemplar of a type of spiritual guru whom we safety interpret against our own lives, and take what we like about him, and ignore the rest. We might, for example, find that his life and death expresses our deepest religious convictions that then we announce through the language of sacrifice or humility or whatever. But what happens when we find a better way of expressing ourselves, better, that is, than what we find interesting in Jesus? Do we simply move on to some other source of personal conviction, some other source to match our spiritual needs?

When Jesus replies to the crowd with the words of the prophet, 'And they shall all be taught by God', and then later, 'I am the bread of life', he was essentially making the same point. The point being: that he is not the best way we have of expressing our convictions or judgments about ourselves and the world; rather, he is the way God expresses himself to us. In other words, it is not enough that we throw around terms like 'wonderful' or 'savior' or 'healer' when it comes to our understanding of Jesus, for the tables have been turned, and what matters is not that we have Jesus all figured out, but that we figure ourselves out - wonder who we are - in light of his identity as the source of life - as God in the flesh, God incarnate.

The implication of such a table-turning becomes clear when we consider how we come to understand, or better yet, learn Jesus. As rational, human animals, we learn in a particular way, through what i mentioned earlier, in practice and training and eventually, knowledge of what is to be done, and how to it well. Following Jesus - learning him - is, at one level, no different than any other kind of knowledge. We study his ways, we find ourselves in the places he said we could find him (in the bread and wine of communion, in the face of the stranger, in the care of the poor and dispossessed), and we speak with language shaped by his ministry of healing and thanksgiving. We can get enthused by studying and following the way of Jesus, the more we find that our lives become increasingly patterned on his. Yet, at a deeper level, learning Jesus is about receiving knowledge, knowledge from a source outside our understanding, knowledge that is light in a darkened room that illumines  the mystery of us and our world. This is what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of being taught by God: it is to see with eyes trained by trust and faith in the God who gives us vision to recognize - albeit faintly sometimes - that Christ's life, death and resurrection overcome sin and death, and gives life to the world.

"I am the living bread", Jesus boldly claims. He might well have said, "I am the source of human life; I am wisdom to be feasted on". We are not asked to suspend the human task of learning or understanding in light of Christ's claim; rather, we are being offered, freely, a kind of divine knowledge that will re-orient our understanding, indeed our very existence, towards a path for living that leads to friendship with God and each other. Jesus' life is to be our unity with God, even as it is how we express our unity with each other. He is the body in which we shall all be interrelated members. For it takes such a sharing of a life to know the depth of love and friendship that is a result of a God who is already at the heart of our being. In learning Jesus, we engage personally and in equality with the personal love that is at the centre of thing, and this is engagement and knowledge of God living in us. It is knowledge we can rest in.

Proper 13: Law & Revolution - The first of four sermons on Law, Love & Language

Proper 13: John 6:24-35

They said to Jesus, "Sir, give us this bread always."

Law, broadly speaking, involves four elements: law is the ordering/organizing of behavior through good thinking (reason), for the general good (a common goal that all serve), made by whoever has care of the community, and declared or somehow announced. So a command to do a particular act is a law in the true sense only when it promotes the general good; where general good means not some generic goodness of certain individuals, but some single common goal that all serve. A true law promotes human well-being.

This is all well and good as definitions go. It provides some terms for judging what constitutes law, and what is closer to lawless action. The daily news cycle presents numerous examples of laws being challenge, re-written, or created that may, or may not, order our behavior through good thinking or be for the general good. Such is the reason why law schools continue to prosper while other schools (seminaries) are closing left, right and center. Law is good business.

So when we watch or experience a ground-shift in the 'law of the land', where the law-making authorities are overthrown or made redundant , we pay attention. To see the demise of a dictator or the collapse of an oppressive regime , and in the clearing smoke and clutter, to see arise a new order that is truly an expression of good thinking and the common good, is to be privy to a remarkable working out of human well-being. I have in mind the myriad of shifts that go under the title of Arab Spring, but you may have other places and times in mind.

For our purposes this morning, if we are to consider the Arab Spring as a re-ordering for the common good, what kind of change is it? Tariq Ramadan, one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals, calls the events "uprisings", more permanent than "revolts" but still short of thoroughgoing "revolutions". According to Ramadan, a revolution requires a complete change in the political rule and economic structure. If it is incomplete or manipulated, or if it fails, it becomes a revolt in history, expressing the peoples’ aspirations without concretizing their hopes. Thus for Ramadan, the term “uprisings” conveys cautious optimism. In his estimation, Tunisia is the only clear democratizing success, and there it remains unclear if the new dispensation will be fundamentally more just than the last.

A true revolutionary change does not occur by mere progress along the established lines, but by radical transformation of the lines themselves. A creative, revolutionary change even though it is not a mere advance along the old lines of continuity, but a discovery of new lines, does not fully realize itself until it can be seen as in a new kind of continuity with the past. The revolution is not consolidated until it sees itself as the 'natural' fulfillment of the aspirations of the people. Standing on the other side of such a change, the idea is to look back and see the new order as expressing the deep and often unspoken hopes for human well-being, hopes that could only be realized with a tectonic shift in how a people and a country are organized towards common goals and common goods for the benefit of all.

If we follow Tariq Ramadan's analysis, the events since 2010 in Africa and the Middle East fall short of revolution, despite the laudable rhetoric often thrown around by politicians and pundits. We may wonder: can there ever be a true revolution, one where radical transformation takes place that bring about a true and lasting order? Can there be a new way of being community, a new law?

If we stick to my general definition of law as the ordering/organizing of behavior through good thinking (reason), for the general good (a common goal that all serve), made by whoever has care of the community, and declared or somehow announced, then we glimpse an emerging new order in Jesus' words from St. John: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.'  We may take this on some spiritual level, and leave Jesus' words as poetic metaphor, or we might hear in such a declaration an announcement of something truly creative and revolutionary: that humanity is summoned, called, to a destiny where the goal of human living is not the fragmented state that we see all around us, but a unity, a point of view from which all our striving for community and justice and love, is made possible and intelligible through a renewed humanity. For the Christian, this new order is our incorporation into the divine life of love and joy through our unity in Christ. In his human life, and eventual death and resurrection, his body becomes the foundation of a new humanity.

We generally do not talk, let alone think, of Jesus in this way, even in the safety of the church. We are more likely to limit the influence of Christ to private spirituality or politicized moral debates, yet what scripture attests to is something far more radical. In Jesus is human communication with God, and this communication, this bodily contact, enables us to criticize the present world, our present society, in terms of a future development which we can for the moment only dimly understand. With the confidence of being held in loving existence by the Creator of all, we can venture forward into an area of which we have no maps, doing so in faith, that the revolution of our world and it's loves and desires, will, in God's time, be complete. Then we will truly see and understand our destiny as friends of God and each other. Then the words of the people, "sir, give us this bread always" will be a request that is finally and ultimately met.

It must be asked: when and where will this revolution of Jesus take place? If the response is: at some future time, after the collapse of other competing legal or political systems, then we are no better off than the dreams of the likes of Karl Marx. What Christianity declares is that the revolution is here and now. We hear this in St. John, as the verbal tense that describes Moses and the given of bread from heaven is transformed into the present tense: it is my Father who gives you the true bread of heaven. In our lives ordered by God's gracious acts of mercy and forgiveness; in our daily life organized towards the good of friend, neighbor and even enemy; in our desires, shaped by justice and charity; we participate in the formation of a people who think and act in the present and in doing so foreshadow the promise of eternal provision and care.

What has taken place in countries like Tunisia is therefore not simply a curiosity of history, but is a reminder that our deepest longings and our proper destiny is to be a people ordered to freedom and peace. For the Christian, we recognize such uprisings as something belonging to God's desire for us all. Yet we also recognize that the only revolution that will satisfy our human longings has begun in Christ: the one in whom we have life eternal. It is he who gives life to the world. In him is the hope of a new humanity