Hunger for God

I hope it is not simply my jaded desires, but food seems to be very much on the mind of so many people these days. Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc., documentaries that deal with food, health and the commercial food industry are being released and discussed. Michael Pollan, who has made a name as a writer about food, has written several books about food and the food industry in America, and last week his was the cover article in The New York Times Magazine, discussing the “foodie” culture in this country. “How is it,” Pollan was asking, “that Americans are obsessed with food, with cooking techniques, with culinary vacations and schools, with television programs about cooks and cooking, with the Food Network, and yet we cook less and less at home?”

Nor is Pollan the only person who is asking questions about food and diet. As we debate and begin to get closer to the political and rhetorical discussions which will inevitable occur around the process of attempting to reform health care in this country, food and diet plays an important part. We live in the country in the world with access to far more food than we could ever need, and one can tell by our waistlines, our diabetes rates, our incidence of heart disease. Yet despite our dietary wealth, the hungry throng our streets; our consumption has ramifications elsewhere in our society and the world.

Food is also an ecological issue, and I was ever so thrilled yesterday to hear on the radio that someone has coined the term “cookprint,” (in the same vein as “carbon footprint”) as a way of measuring the ecological ramifications of our cooking and eating habits.

As a culture we are only starting to awaken to the ecological ramifications of food, as we eye our peanut butter for salmonella and our beef for mad cow disease, it is clear that the economies of scale in food production are a two-edged sword, increasing our production, but often decreasing our health.

There are those who take these issues with a deadly seriousness. Those adherents of the faith known as “organic and local,” who worship at the altars of food co-ops and spurn those dens of iniquity, fast-food chains.

And, as if food wasn’t complicated enough, it is clear that food has a deep symbolic and aesthetic hold for most of us. No one can doubt that, picking up an issue of Gourmet magazine, or Food & Wine, and reading the almost literary lauding of food, or the ways that food can be an indicator of our class or our wealth or the ways that individuals can have very strange relationships indeed with food.

When I was in high school, I went with my father to the hospital to visit a friend of mine, and the child of a member of the parish, who had been hospitalized with anorexia nervosa. She was a few years older than me, and yet she weighed ninety pounds. Her skin was yellow as she flirted with jaundice.

I realized, as I spoke with her, that her life had a hole, an emptiness at its center – she was a living walking ball of hunger and desire; I realized that the cold hunger at her core was not about food, or health, or ecology. It was about control, longing and desire.

Here was my friend, living a life of happiness, in a wealthy upper middle-class, white suburban family, with a vast gaping, bottomless hole in the center of her life.

So food, for us, is a complex thing, and we as a culture have a complex relationship with it. We adore food, and hate it sometimes; there is, most certainly, a great deal of emotion connected to food for us. I wonder, as I listen to the focus, the obsession, the mania about food, and where it comes from, and who gets it, if all that energy and focus does really mean that we as a culture, as a society, are desperately, desperately hungry and full of longing.

I wonder if the obsession about food in our culture isn't really the symptom of a rather old story, that “God-shaped hole” which St. Augustine was trying to describe in The Confessions, in that oft quoted phrase “You made us for yourself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.”

Which would make what Jesus is saying in the Gospel for this morning rather simple.

“I am the bread of life,” says Jesus, “I come to fill the hunger within you. I am what you are longing for, in whatever way you long.” It is little wonder that the crowd starts to wonder and people start to complain. We would do the same. Who is this teacher, to make claims of that order? Hunger, thirst, longing, desire; those are universal feelings that everyone experiences, that form the bedrock of our human experience. Every infant knows hunger and longing, every adult fears feeling them. And who doesn’t get a little tense, when some strange teacher suggests to us that there is emptiness at the center of us.

Indeed, so much of our culture seems to be an attempt to preserve the myth that the emptiness is not just outside our doors, waiting to spring on us.

Longing, desire, thirst are universal, and what Jesus is saying when he says “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the vine, you are the branches,” or when he speaks of “living waters” is a simple hammering home of the point that nothing, ultimately, will take away that longing and thirst, that hunger at the center of our beings, except the One who created it in our hearts.

Which leaves us in rather an unusual place. We need food, we are built to long for many things in life, but the longing that we have for those necessities, what they remind us of are the longing that we have for the Bread from Heaven, for that food which will sate us forever and ever.

Which some people have take to mean that the Christian faith is about a great deal of self-denial and self-punishment. But notice that Jesus doesn't really seem to be into a great deal of self-denial. So many of the stories about Jesus are him healing, or feeding thousands, or sitting down to a meal with his friends. So many of the images of the Scriptures are images about food and feasting, about the dinner which will ring down the curtain on this life. So many of the stories of Jesus are stories about Jesus interacting with the physical, not as religious prude, or as aesthete, but as someone who sees the good things in life, food, wine, friendship, and silence, and loves them for what they are. Not as symbols, not as something to be hated or feared, or loved overly much, but as manna in the wilderness, bread for the journey, an aperitif to wet the appetites, for that feast and supper which is the true ending of our hungers, our longings and desires: Jesus, Lamb of God, the bread of life.

Preached by Fr. Andrew Ashcroft

9 August 2009

St. Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Signs

You are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. (Jn 6:26)

I am preparing to leave, in several days, for a long walk along the Way of Saint James in northern Spain. If all goes according to plan, I will walk 400 miles over the four weeks I am away, from Bilbao to Santiago de Compostela. Many of you have heard me speak of this journey before, or, to be more precise, a similar one I made seven years ago when I walked a different route from the Pyrenees to Santiago, the traditional burial place of the remains of Saint James the Apostle.

Among the many questions that spring to mind when contemplating such a journey is how you know where you are going. I am not bringing maps or even a guide, though I have collected a few notes from pilgrims who have walked the way before and posted tips on the Internet. I am counting on following signs, though I know from what I have read that they will not be as plentiful as they were along the more heavily traveled route I took seven years ago. There, other pilgrims have painted yellow arrows along the way: on roads and tree trunks and the sides of buildings or on rocks along a path. Most times that I was uncertain or confused about how to proceed, I had only to look around and see that a yellow arrow had been painted to show me the way, and I was just fine.

So I am counting on following the signs again. This is an important and obvious metaphor for life. How do we know which way to go in life? We can charge right through it and blaze our own trail and simply make the most out wherever the path we blaze should lead us. Or we can try to look for signs that lead us in a right way, along a path and to a place that God has already imagined for us.

The first way – blazing our own path – is popular in our society, which, like an adolescent, resents the idea of being told where to go.

The second – looking for signs – is rooted to the idea that God calls us all to follow a way that we might not likely choose for ourselves, but promises blessings as we go.

The Christian life presumes that God is calling us to lead lives following a path of his choosing, not our own, but it is up to us to watch for the signs as we go. This practice of looking for signs has gotten difficult because we are confronted with so many actual signs encouraging us to blaze our own path. Most of these signs would lead us to buy something: a car, a house, a cell phone. And since we are a consumer nation this suits us very well. We feel that we are doing what we should be doing when we buy something. And we even tell ourselves that we are blazing our own path, being our own person, when we buy something that a corporation has spent millions of dollars encouraging us to buy. But as long as we get what we want, what difference does it make?

The crowd of 5,000 or so who followed Jesus after he fed them with five loaves and two fish realized that Jesus had given them what they wanted, for free. They knew a good thing when they saw one, and so they went looking for him again. They don’t come right out and ask Jesus to do it again – to feed them for free – but he knows what they are up to.

“You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves,” he says. In other words, you got what you want, and you have come looking for more. You are consumers, not pilgrims, and I see right through you.

In the church these days we clergy often assume that you people in the pews (and more pointedly, those who are not in the pews) are also consumers, not pilgrims, and that it is in our best interests to give you what you want (even though we don’t really have the foggiest idea what that might be). And I suppose that some of this is natural enough. But it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. Nothing ever changes. Life is not transformed if all we ever do is get what we set out looking for. And no one learns very much; no one grows.

It is remarkable to note the fickleness of the crowd that follows Jesus. Just yesterday they were witnesses and beneficiaries of the miracle of the bread and fish. They ate all they wanted and left enough crumbs to fill twelve baskets, although they must have known that it all came from only five loaves and two fish. And today, here they are asking Jesus, “What sign are you going to give us then, so we may see it and believe you?” But Jesus will not play this game with them. He will not just give them what they want. He tries to teach them how to see the signs.

It is a matter of spiritual maturity to grow beyond the childish desire simply to be given what we already know we want and to learn to look for the signs of God’s calling in our lives. I sometimes refer to this as the shift from asking what I want to asking what God might want of me. And it is not an easy shift to make, since most of the time I am very in touch with what I want, and very interested in getting it.

And because I am quite stubborn, I am also quite blessed that God has given me the time and inclination to go practice looking for signs, along 400 miles or so of walk in northern Spain. But this is not practical for most people and certainly not a realistic starting point. So Jesus helps us to see a sign right in our midst: “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world,” he says. “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

It is also a matter of some spiritual maturity to see, in the weekly or daily act of prayer with a disk of bread and a cup of wine, the sign that Jesus is pointing to. When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” he is holding up a sign that says, “Follow me.” But it remains to be seen, in that moment, where exactly he is leading each one of us. Because this sign of bread and wine is a beginning that prompts us to make the shift from asking what I want to asking what God wants of me. This tiny nourishment strengthens us for an inner journey that we can make no matter where we are, or how ambulatory we might be.

Saint Paul, who was a great pilgrim, knew what it felt like to shift from asking what he wanted to asking what God wanted of him. He also knew that it was a difficult shift to make. But he saw that when we make that shift we grow up, discovering gifts we never knew we had, being strengthened for work we never knew we could accomplish, finding love that we never knew could be so strong. He called growing up this way (in a slightly older translation of his words) growing into the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” which is a beautiful phrase, if you ask me.

To grow up into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ is to become more ad more adept at seeing and following the signs that Jesus plants for us.

To my eyes our work at Saint James the Less is a sign, as is our feeding of the hungry every Saturday. Our worship together – so often joyful, so often connecting us to one another, so often leading us to transcendent moments – is a sign of what God intends for us, where he is calling us. And always, here, day in and day out, the little round signs of God’s love that Christ shares with us as his gives us his Body, the Bread of life, and his Blood of salvation.

And the more we grow up the more we see something like little yellow arrows on those wafers or in the reflection at the bottom of the chalice, as Jesus feeds us, and helps point the way, so that we truly can grow up into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 August 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

A thousand darknesses and one Light

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. (Jn 6:15-17)

It was not very like the disciples of Jesus to do something on their own initiative. And when they did, they often got it wrong. Think of Peter cutting off the ear of a man in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Today we are told by Saint John that when evening came, the sun was setting, and everyone else was stoking the fire and enjoying supper, our friends the disciples decided to put to sea. Jesus has left them after the melee that was prompted by his feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fish. He was not about to let the adoring crowd determine his fate (he knows how fickle a crowd is). So he slipped through the bushes and back up the hillside to a secret place, hidden even from his own followers.

What put it into their heads to get in the boat as night was falling? They wanted to get to Capernaum – perhaps they had already discussed with Jesus that this would be his next stop. Some of them were fishermen, and not unfamiliar, I suppose, with handling a boat during the darker hours of the day. Whatever their reasoning, they do not seem to be acting on instructions from Jesus; they are simply making it up as they go along.

And Saint John gives us now one of the most evocative phrases of all scripture, if you ask me: “It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.”

Start with the dark. We all know that even in broad daylight or with the lights blaring we can be in the dark.

It’s dark if you are one of the millions of Americans who’s lost their jobs lately.

It’s dark if you are counting the months or the weeks or the days till your deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.

It’s dark if you’ve fallen off the wagon of your sobriety again.

It’s dark if you’ve run out of ways to shuffle your debt.

It’s dark when the sharp pain of a loved one’s death has turned into a dull throb that you fear will never go away.

It’s dark when the chemo doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

It’s dark when you haven’t spoken to a brother or a sister for years and your pride won’t let you break the silence.

It’s dark when you are honest about the things you’ve done wrong, and didn’t have to.

It’s dark when your mother or your father doesn’t recognize you any more.

It’s dark when you wake up in the morning and you can’t think of a reason or find the energy to get out of bed.

You could name other ways that it’s dark in the middle of the day, when despair eclipses hope, options have narrowed, you squint your eyes, but still see no light at the end of the tunnel. The dark is not a time of day, it’s a state of being. And sometimes it seems as though we must constantly adapt to the darkness, so much so that we seem to become adept at being nocturnal creatures, who can operate just fine in the dark.

Why did the disciples get into the boat when it was dark? They do not know where Jesus is. The crowd, who continue to look for Jesus the next day, is confused for a while, because they know that the disciples left without Jesus. Were the disciples forging on ahead, preparing the way for Jesus? Or were they making something of a get-away? Frightened by the power of his signs and his refusal to respond to the awe of the crowds, are they having second thoughts about following this man?

Are they frightened when they see Jesus on the water, at least in part, because he has found them out and caught them as they are making an escape from him? It was dark, after all, and they had thought they could get away with it. Have they decided that they prefer the darkness to the light?

Who knows? But we do know what it feels like to be in the boat in the dark without Jesus. We know what it feels like when the seas become rough because a strong wind is blowing, don’t we? We know that these are not just maritime conditions, but also states of being.

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. We know too well what this feels like, too. And it doesn’t really matter whether we are running away of our own accord or if we have simply found ourselves in the boat in rough seas. What matters in the moment is that it is now dark and Jesus has not yet come to us.

Take note that it is not the weather that frightens the disciples – although it is getting rough. It is the appearance of Jesus in the midst of this plan of their own devising that terrifies them. Of course he should not be walking to them on the water, this is unsettling; but they might have been amazed and glad to see their teacher performing such a great sign.

Their fear is a signal (though they do not realize it at the time) that they are in the presence of the living God. “Fear not” is a colloquialism of the Bible for just this reason. But they do not know what their fear signifies. They were impressed, it has to be said, with the bread and the fish, but they do not know what it meant. Perhaps they had been hoping for some time on their own in Capernaum to talk it over among themselves, decide if they really want to follow this Jesus who resists the support of the very crowds he so excites.

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. It was not the time of day, it was a state of being. And into that state of being, Jesus strides across the rough surface of the sea. “It is I,” he says, “do not be afraid.”

And Saint John gives us two more wonderful details.

First he tells us that eventually the disciples want to take Jesus in the boat with them. They are willing at last to incorporate Jesus into their plans, to take him with them where they were going. When Matthew and Mark tell this story, the whole point of it is that Jesus gets into the boat with them. It’s a great sermon, and easy one to preach! But here, in John’s gospel, Jesus never gets into the boat. All John tells us is that the disciples eventually decide they would have invited him in.

Second, John tells us, that once they have decided it will be OK to include Jesus in their nighttime excursion, they find themselves delivered immediately to where they were headed, their destination reached, their objective accomplished. Now Jesus can get on with his work.

Saint John knows that none of this is about the weather or the time of day; it is all about a state of being. And he knows that when it is dark, and the seas are rough, a strong wind blowing, many of us are not prepared to let Jesus into the boat, even if he should walk on the water to get to us.

We claim our faith in that moment when we decide we want to take Jesus into the boat with us – for now our state of being has changed, the plan we hatched on our own is turned over to Jesus, the time of day, and the conditions hardly matter, and we find that we have arrived at our destination.

Start with the dark. A thousand darknesses descend on our lives, cloaking our vision in shadows, regardless of the time of day. And we know so well what it feels like when it is dark and Jesus has not yet come to us.

What plans of our own devising are we in the midst of when we realize it is dark? Have we really meant to include Jesus in those plans? Are we going on ahead of him? Or are we really trying to make our escape from this man, who, while admittedly impressive with loaves and fishes, leaves us feeling uneasy. Are we wearing the nametag of a disciple uncomfortably, uncertainly, and do we think, maybe, if we could get away from him for a night and talk it over with one another, we might actually come up with another, easier plan? Or is it just easier for us to move about in the dark? Have we become so adept at it that it seems like the best time to make our move?

Earlier in his gospel, Saint John allows that some of us would just as soon allow the darkness to be our natural habitat. “Light has come into the world,” he writes, “and men loved darkness rather than light.”

It is now dark. We start in the dark. We have plans of our own that so often do not include Jesus, have not considered him and the claim he makes on our lives. And we believe that we can handle the boat even though it’s dark and a strong wind is blowing. And we may even be right about that – some of the time.

But Jesus does come to us, striding across the rough waters of our lives. If it is frightening, we should not be surprised – this is a signal that we are in the presence of the living God.

Maybe Jesus is going to get into the boat with us and calm the storm. It has been known to happen.

But maybe he is waiting for us to decide that we want him with us in the first place. And maybe that’s enough – the words of invitation need never be uttered. All that’s needed is wanting Jesus in the boat, choosing to have him with us, preferring the light to the darkness.

When we make that choice, we should not be surprised that our small goals are easily accomplished, as we arrive immediately at out destination. And we hear Jesus calling us to help him get on with his good work.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

26 July 2009

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia