Is Jesus Good for You?

An acquaintance recently confided that although he had been a Christian all his life, these days (in his middle-age years) he approaches his faith and his religion with all kinds of questions.  I think he expected me to be taken aback by this revelation, as though it were an admission of weakness, and a confession of a failing.  To the contrary, I think it is good and normal to approach both religion and faith with questions at various times of your life – maybe your whole life long.  And one of the most fundamental of those questions is floating near the surface of the Gospel reading this morning, although it may not be immediately evident.

After Jesus’ miraculous feeding of five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, a crowd came looking for him, and they were hungry for something.  “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” As though he had not just miraculously fed five thousand people out of thin air, more or less.

Jesus told the clamoring crowd that “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” 

“Great!” they replied, “give us this bread always.”  And Jesus famously declared to the fickle crowd, in a phrase that would prove to be awkward to set to music, “I am the bread of life.”

“I am the bread of life!”  This is fine as far as it goes.  And we could stand around and wonder what exactly Jesus means by this, except that it is pretty clear from the context that he means that he is the very thing that gives hope in the face of hopelessness, spiritual nourishment in the face of inner starvation, and everlasting life in the face of meaningless death.

There remains a more pressing question, however, that was the underlying issue behind the crowd’s clamoring.  It’s a question that was as poignant a couple of thousand years ago as it is to us today, and that question is this: If Jesus is the bread of life, is Jesus good for you?

Is Jesus good for you?

It is no longer so clear, for instance, that bread is good for you.  I, for one, realize that the less bread I eat the better off I will be – although I love bread and butter, or bread and cheese, or bread and nearly anything.  Unless I am walking the Camino de Santiago and burning calories at a rate of knots, bread equals carbs, and I cannot take it for granted that bread is so good for me.

There was a time, I think, maybe, when people did not have to think much about whether or not Jesus was good for you; just like there was a time when people did not have to think much about whether or not bread is good for you.  But those days are over.  We don’t take very much for granted these days, not even things we once thought were good for us, like butter, or salt, or gluten.  And if Jesus is going to run around telling people that he is the bread of life – or if he expects us to run around telling people that he is the bread of life, then we are probably going to ask at some level, is Jesus good for us?  Does Jesus make us better people?  Does he make us healthier, nicer, smarter?  Do we end up with shinier coats and cleaner teeth?  Does Jesus confer any moral superiority on us?  Do we become better parents, spouses, or workers as a result of our relationship with Jesus?  Will we be any happier because of Jesus?  Any more patient, any prettier, any more virtuous?  Is Jesus good for you?

Many people seem to have concluded that Jesus is not good for them or for you.  To begin with Jesus is so judgmental – or at least he threatens to be.  And nothing is more offensive to a large segment of modern American society than someone who seems judgmental.  “Don’t judge” has become a maxim for our time that requires no further expansion, since its wisdom is unquestioned.  Many people conclude, from the evidence around them, that, in fact, Jesus is not good for you, because he makes you narrow-minded, intolerant, and stupid, if you follow his teachings and belong to his church.  Zen makes you more compassionate, but Jesus makes you a doofus, to put it kindly.

Is Jesus good for you?  By no means is the answer to this question clear to the world, and sometimes not even to the church!  It would appear that what we need are some studies, what we need is some data, what we need is some empirical evidence about whether or not Jesus is good for you; just like we need studies, data, and evidence to determine whether or not gluten is good for you.

The problem is that if we can’t figure out whether or not bread is good for us at this stage of human development, then we will have at least as hard a time figuring out whether or not Jesus is good for us.  Experts will disagree.  The data will be inconclusive.  The studies will be assumed to have been rigged by those who commissioned them.  And ten years from now the conventional wisdom may shift, as it may shift again ten years after that, and ten years after that, etc., etc.  And still the question remains, Is Jesus good for you?

It is tempting to say that the answer depends: that it depends on who you are and what you want in life, out of this world.  Do you want mercy, forgiveness, kindness, justice, peace, generosity, and hope?  Then Jesus is good for you.  It is tempting to throw the ball back in your court like this, as if the question depends on you.  And we often like this way of looking at things because it confirms our sneaking suspicion that the universe revolves around each one of us individually.  By this thinking, Jesus is good for you if you are good for Jesus.  And I suppose that’s alright, as far as it goes.  You do your thing; I’ll do mine.  Go ahead and follow Jesus if you have nothing better to do with your Sunday mornings.  Jesus is good for you if you are good for Jesus.

But this doesn’t sound like tremendously good news to me.  It sounds like pretty good news, or not… depending on you.  And if that’s so, then this way of looking at things doesn’t really tell you anything at all about Jesus.

Is Jesus good for you?

Well, this pulpit is here for a reason, and the reason is this: so that Sunday by Sunday someone may stand here and proclaim that, yes, Jesus is good for you!  Jesus is light, and water, and love, amid a shadowy, parched landscape of fear and distrust.  Light, and water, and love.  The virtues of these elements do not depend on you or on me.  We need them, and they exist in the world by the grace of God: light, and water, and love.  And although we have become a species able to adapt without them for long periods of time, we do so at our own peril.  We stumble over the question, is Jesus good for me? at our own peril, too.

A long time ago, Moses -who had probably had a dysfunctional childhood, and who, as a young man had anger issues so severe that he casually committed murder with his bare hands - found himself face to face (more or less) with God, who appeared to him in a burning bush.  Jesus was there in the bush, whether Moses knew it or not, he was there in the gentle flames that did not consume the bush, and he was there in the voice that spoke to Moses, even if his accent was undetectable to Moses within the thunderous sonorities of God’s voice.

Confused and frightened though he may have been, Moses sensed that whomever this Being was who was speaking to him, he was powerful.  But Moses had seen power before around the courts of Pharoah, and he knew that power was not inherently good.  He’d felt power before in his own hands when he killed a man, and he knew that power was not inherently good.

So here he is facing this powerful Being, whose power is capable of being so soft that it burns with bright flame that nevertheless does not consume the bush.  And Moses must have asked himself, as he took off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy, he must have asked, is this good for me?  He did not yet know that God would lead him and all the Israelites out of slavery.  He did not yet know that God had a promised land flowing with milk and honey to bring him to.  He did not yet know that God would give him commandments of love and justice, and that he, Moses, would forever be associated with those laws.  He only knew that here was this caressing flame, and this powerful voice, and this Presence that was so alluring, so gentle, and so strong.  And I think he must have wondered, Is this good for me?

But you can’t ask a burning bush a question like that; you can’t ask the voice of God a thing like that.  So instead, he asks this: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

And God said to Moses, “I AM…   Tell them I AM has sent me to you.”

You can learn a lot from a burning bush – I wish there were more of them.

For I believe that the answer to the question - is Jesus good for you? - is to be found within the burning bush.

Is Jesus good for you?  I AM, comes the reply, we know not whence – from some caressing flame that burns within the branches of the church, and yet never consumes us.

Over the next several weeks, the church wades around in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, which seems to hear the evangelist repeating over and over Jesus’ declaration that “I am the bread of life: I am.” 

I suppose St. John, too, knew of the pertinence of this question: Is Jesus good for you?  I suppose we are not the first ones to ask it.  Of course in his day, gluten intolerance was as yet unknown, and bread, the staff of life, was an unambiguous gift of the earth and of human labor.  And what they didn’t know about gluten, they made up for with what they knew about burning bushes, and about the name of the One who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light, out of a parched desert of slavery across a river of freedom, and out of a life of fear and distrust into a life of love.

What did he tell Moses his name was? I AM.  I AM.  I AM.

And when they heard Jesus tell them over and over again, “I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.  I am the bread of life.” as John asserts in his Gospel that Jesus repeated again and again, did they not hear the echoes of that holy Name?  And recognize at last the accent once unrecognizable in the burning bush?  And when they asked themselves, as Moses did, and as we do too, and as everyone with questions about faith and religion must do in this complicated world – Is he good for us?  Is Jesus good for us? – did they wink at each other with knowing looks as the answer became so clear: I AM.  I AM.  I AM the bread of life.  I AM.

Is Jesus good for you?

Don’t take my word for it.  Listen to the One who spoke once from the burning bush, and again in the synagogue of Capernaum, and today, I pray, right here on Locust Street.  Is Jesus good for you?

I AM, he says, I am the bread of life.  I AM.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

2 August 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

The end of hostility

He is our peace… he has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. (Ephesians 2:14)

Although for the past couple of years the Rectory has been home to five or six members of the Servant Year community, it is still the four-footed residents of the household – canine, feline, and murine – that provide me with the best fodder for sermons.  The introduction of a new cat, after the somewhat heart-breaking demise of the last one, has provided me with new reflections on the possibilities of inter-special harmony, since Gus, the new cat, is a much more sociable creature than his predecessor.

On arrival in the Rectory, Gus identified his place in balance of power right away.  He established his dominance over the mouse population with and impressive and immediate efficiency.  And he adopted an appropriate attitude of skittish suspicion toward the two Labrador Retrievers in the house.  But Gus, who has been with us for less than six months, is turning out to be a curious, brave, and assertive cat. For a while he was equal parts nervous and inquisitive about the dogs, and he has been known to find safe perches in high places from which to observe them.

But over the weeks, Gus has steadily narrowed the distance between himself and the dogs, feeling more and more confident and comfortable with less and less space between him and them.  It helps that Gus has realized that he is both faster and more agile than either of the dogs.  He has advanced from watching the dogs safely from an upper landing of the staircase, to lurking around corners to catch glimpses of them, to parking himself on the opposite side of a door against which a dog is resting and playing with the dog’s tail in the gap under the door.  Occasionally Gus would investigate a room recently occupied by the dogs, only to make a hasty exit when they returned to that room, like after a walk.

But very recently Gus surprised me when, as I returned from a walk with both dogs and brought them into my office, I found the cat parked casually on one of the wing chairs in the room, showing no intention whatsoever of vacating the premises.

I myself had elsewhere to be, with no time for complicated social experiments.  I asked Gus if he really meant to stay there with the dogs in the same room, and he glanced at me with a look of steely but casual determination in his eyes.  I put both dogs inside the office with him, and closed the door behind me, wondering what I would find when I returned, but confident that Gus could always find refuge on the mantle or the bookshelves, to which the dogs have no access, being poor climbers of vertical planes.

Amusing as this little scenario is, it also illustrates a quite remarkable refusal on the part of the cat to inhabit an environment of endless hostility.  Despite his initial assessment of the power dynamics of the Rectory, he has apparently suspected that things could change, and that (unlike his predecessor) he need not live in a culture of hostility and fear his entire life.  This is a curious and noble insight for a cat to have.  Why, then, is it so very hard for us humans to see the world in this way?

Whoever it was who wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians, picking up on the tradition of St. Paul, saw in Jesus’ ministry of love on the Cross something like this insight: that we do not need to live our lives enmeshed in hostile relationships with one another, and that among the reasons Jesus gave his life was to make this lesson available to us.  “For he is our peace… he has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”  The writer of these words was addressing the rift between Jew and Gentile, and the question of whether it could ever be spanned, and I have to admit I wonder where his brave and insightful answer came from.

In the Gospel this morning, we hear how Jesus was followed by a large crowd.  Matthew tells us that Jesus “had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.”  But Matthew does not tell us what Jesus taught them.

It’s an unusual thing about the Christian faith and tradition that the central figure of our religion provided no written record of his teaching (although he could have), and that the written record about him is mostly narrative, and not much instruction on purity, rule, or commandment.  When people flocked to Jesus he taught them many things – but what were those things?  What was Jesus teaching?  And why did no one bother to write it down?  Is it all covered elsewhere in the Scriptures – like in the Sermon on the Mount?  Were his other teachings so commonplace that no one thought it was worth the time to write them down?

Or, I wonder if perhaps Jesus sat there with his followers teaching them about cats and dogs.  Maybe in a corner of the synagogue, or in someone’s house there was a cat curled up in the warm crescent of a large dog’s belly, the cat’s head snuggled under the dog’s chin. 

And maybe Jesus, inhabiting a world of hostility, as he did, and teaching in a religious tradition pockmarked with hostility, as it was, (just like ours), when he was asked questions about purity, rule, and commandment, pointed to the cat nestled in the embrace of the sleeping dog, and said, “Little children, you remember that the prophet said that the ‘wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.’  You have thought that this was poetic license, but I tell you that your heavenly Father wants you to learn to live just like that dog and that cat: without any hostility between you and any other nations, language, peoples, or tongues.”

It’s hard to teach that kind of lesson (of peace and love) while pontificating about purity, rules, and commandment.  And, as Pope Francis recently pointed out to a gathering of children, this kind of peace-nik teaching will always find its detractors, because almost no one gets rich on peace.

No wonder no one wrote it down if Jesus ever taught like this.  This is a children’s tale of puppies and kittens, that grown-ups do well to out-grow, and it is foolishness to pretend otherwise.  The world is a messy complicated place, and hostility is just a part of it.  Far better to teach your children how to stand their ground when it is threatened, how to claim their strength and their power, how to know who’s side they are on, than to point to sleeping pets and find a lesson there.

One thing about domesticated pets is that they are comfortably middle-class.  Their hierarchy of needs is generally well met, which is why they find the romantic notion of nature “red in tooth and claw” so incongruous with their existence.  No dog, no cat is looking to make any money in the military industrial complex that has become a humming engine at the center of the world we inhabit, and that depends on hostility, or at least the promise of hostility, to keep it running.

Someone was selling arms in Jesus’ day too.  Someone was getting rich by exploiting hostilities in his day – there is nothing new under the sun.

And people flocked to Jesus, and he had compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.  No doubt some of them wanted to take up arms, and wave flags, and claim the heritage of the house of David that had once been mighty in battle.

And Jesus taught them many things.  We don’t know exactly what he taught them – much of it is lost to posterity.  But it seems pretty clear that he did not arm them, or give them target practice. 

It’s far more believable, I’d say, that he taught them about a brave little cat, who found his place within the balance of power, and then dared to change that balance, not by challenging the strength and size of his canine neighbors, but by asserting his desire to be close to them, to pose no threat to them, and to insist that they pose no threat to him either…

…by refusing to live in a context of permanent fear and hostility, and teaching his two new friends that if they lay quietly near him, they could hear him purr.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

19 July 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Manna from heaven

For forty years the children of Israel ate manna in the desert.  The Scriptures say that “it was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey.”

“Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away.  On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much… some gathered much, some little.  And when they measured it… the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.”

It is, of course almost impossible to believe such a thing.  Even if you account for the number “forty” as an indicator for the more vague meaning: “a long time,” it’s hard to believe that the grumbling, complaining followers of Moses (or anyone, for that matter) subsisted on this dew-like substance, that evaporated from the ground with the sunshine.

An interesting detail: “Moses said to them, ‘No one is to keep any of it until morning.’  However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell.”  This detail, like so many details of the stories of Israel’s pilgrimage to the Promised Land, contributes to the general sense that the stories cannot possibly have taken place in history.  It all just seems so hard to believe.  Who knows?  I don’t.

What I suspect is this – that the details of the taste and texture of the manna from heaven are unimportant, as unimportant as the actual amount of time the children of Israel may have wandered through the wilderness.  But the matter of the perishibility of the manna is not unimportant at all.

History is silent about the truth of the existence of manna.  God seems to have wanted to allow for a kind of historical exhibit of manna for all posterity: he tells Moses to “take a jar and put [a measure] of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.”  But this artifact and its contents have been lost, just like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and Noah’s ark.  Who can truly believe that they ever really existed?  I don’t know.

But I know that if you want to know what kind of economy God would set up, if we really allowed him to govern our lives, you don’t have to scratch your head and wonder.  God knows there are people who are perfectly capable of getting up early and collecting more than their fair share of the manna.  God knows that such early birds could sell it at a profit.  God knows that there are those who could corner the market in manna, stockpile it, and make a killing.  And God knows that there are those who would sleep in and miss out on the manna.  He knows that there are those who are too weak, or too lazy, or too stupid, frankly, or whose knees don’t work so well anymore, or whose backs go out whenever they try to bend over and collect their share of the manna.  God knows.  And God doesn’t care.  “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”  This is a rule, established by God.  And in case you forgot, or deliberately held on to more manna than you needed overnight, the excess would be crawling with maggots in the morning, just to show you.

We heard St. Paul refer to this unbelievable story in one of his letters to the fledgling church in Corinth, as he is trying to help them learn what it means to act like a Christian community, a community gathered in Christ’s name, a community called to embody God’s will for his people.  It was a community in which there was a marked disparity between those who had a great abundance, and those who had great need.  (Sound familiar?)  He is writing to the young church about its offering and support for the poor.  And St. Paul reaches for this simple and unbelievable story from way back in the Bible, and its un-complicated insistence: The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”

I’m not going to torture the point here.  You can see where this is going.  I’m not going to try to paint a picture of those in our own day and age who have gathered too much, or of those who have gathered too little.  Let me just say this: both pictures are grotesque in the extreme: wealth and poverty in our midst that are grotesque in the extreme.  I’m not going to say that it is easy to calculate the life-lesson here – how much is too much, how much is too little? - I’m not at all sure it is simple to do this math.  But I am pretty sure the calculations should not be so extreme as they are in our society.

What I’m going to say is that if you want to know how God organizes things, what God thinks is good and right and fair, you don’t have to wonder: it’s right there: “the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”

I can think of dozens of ways to rationalize and explain this lesson away: beginning with the sheer supposed foolishness of believing that there was a time when a wandering people grumbled in the wilderness that they were hungry, and God left a tasty dew on the ground that fed them for forty years.  You’d have to be a little gullible these days, I guess, to believe a story like that.  This, of course, is a common, but often unstated, assessment of Christians: that we are gullible.  You’ve got to be at least a little gullible to believe this stuff.  If you weren’t gullible you’d be spiritual, but not religious.  Spiritual is OK.  But religion, with all its hard-to-believe stories, is for the gullible.  Manna from heaven: LOL!

But even amongst the religions, I have this suspicion that we are becoming – maybe we have become - a people who no longer believe in manna.  And you can imagine that I see this as a danger.

And if we are in danger of becoming a people who no longer believe in manna, then we are in danger of becoming a people who no longer believe in a Promised Land.

And if we should become a people who are in danger of no longer believing in a Promised Land, then we are in danger of becoming a people who no longer believe in the kingdom of heaven.

And if we should become a people who no longer believe in the kingdom of heaven, then what is the point?

And in a sense, it all starts with the manna.  You give up on the manna and so much else falls away.

And what’s the thing about the manna?  It isn’t the flavor, or the texture, or the presentation – it’s that God provides it, and that everyone gets what he or she needs.  It’s that those who gathered much did not gather too much, and those who gathered little did not gather too little.

There has been a fair bit of gasping about the news this past week or so.  There have been two remarkable Supreme Court decisions, and one rendition of Amazing Grace that left a lot of people gasping, one way or another.  And of course it is dangerous to talk about either Supreme Court decisions or about singing presidents from the pulpit.  So I want to say that I know this.  But it is important to talk about manna from the pulpit – lest we become a people who no longer believe in manna.

And from where I stand - in this city that is built, in part, on the amazing gifts of medical care that have been developed in the most extravagant way – access to that care is more or less a question, not of legislation, but of manna.  Those who gathered much did not gather too much, and those who gathered little did not gather too little.

And from where I stand, the human right of gay and lesbian people to enter into marriages that can be sanctioned by the state, in this nation that grants privileges to married people, is a question, not of states’ rights, but of manna.  Those who gathered much did not gather too much, and those who gathered little did not gather too little.

And from where I stand, the reality of the plight of so many black Americans whose lives seem not to matter very much in the eyes of some in our nation, is a question, not of regional heritage, or respect for law enforcement, or anything else, but of manna.  Those who gathered much did not gather too much, and those who gathered little did not gather too little.

It all begins with manna.  It begins with recognizing how hungry you are, that somehow you have ended up in the wilderness.  You grumble, and if you do not grumble to God directly, then some Moses hears your grumbles, and passes them on to the Lord.  And amazingly, like dew in the morning, manna comes down from heaven!  And now you can set off again for the Promised Land.

On the way to the Promised Land, we are trying not to forget the manna.  We are trying not to tire of it.  We are trying not to resent God for feeding us with nothing but this manna, nothing but this bread from heaven.  We are trying not to forget that God has someplace for us to go, even though we don’t know where that place is, we just believe that it is flowing with milk and honey (a welcome change from the manna)!

On the way to whatever Promised Land God is calling us to (and this is an idea, mind you, not a piece of real estate), we are trying to remember that Jesus has already told us about a kingdom.  He called that kingdom the kingdom of heaven, and he told us that it is at hand.  And mostly we don’t know what that means.  (We are still struggling with the manna!)  But the manna tells us something important about the Promised Land, something important about the kingdom.  It tells us that those who gathered much did not gather too much did not gather too much, and those who gathered little did not gather too little.

St. Paul was being cautious in his letter, not to say what was too much and what was too little.  St Paul was secretly an Episcopalian.  He knew that this was a delicate matter.  But he also knew that responsible people of faith could figure out when too much is too much, and when too little is too little.  Has that become too difficult a task for us?  I hope not.

I hope it has not become too much to ask of us to hold on to our belief in the manna that came down from heaven, and to know manna in our own day and age when we see it, even if it looks like a visit to the doctor, or a marriage license, or claiming with the urgency of the moment that black lives matter in America.

The manna just keeps coming: manna from heaven: gifts of God for the people of God, with which he nourishes and feeds us.  There is more than enough for everyone.  May it be that those who gather do not gather too much, and those who gather little do not gather too little.  And may God draw us ever closer to the Promised Land, and ever more deeply into his kingdom.  And let it start with manna.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

28 June 2015

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia