Words of Eternal Life

I heard an interview on the radio this week that maybe some of you heard too (http://www.npr.org/2015/08/21/433478728/one-lawyers-fight-for-young-blacks-and-just-mercy).  The lawyer Bryan Stevenson, now head of the Equal Justice Initiative, was talking about what happened to him one night outside his middle-class apartment in Atlanta, when he was sitting in his car listening to music and getting a few papers together for the next morning.  Stevenson, who is black and was in his twenties at the time—a recent graduate of Harvard Law School—saw a police car approach and wondered why they were there.  He quickly realized that they were there because he was there, because he was a young black man sitting in a parked car at night in a white neighborhood.  Never mind that he lived in that neighborhood.  He was right outside his own apartment.  The police didn’t want to hear about that.  They grabbed him, pointed a gun at his head, and said “Move and I’ll blow your head off.” Terrified, he began saying to them “It’s ok.  It’s all right.  It’s ok.  It’s all right.” 

Bryan Stevenson cooperated with the police that night but they held him for about fifteen minutes without ever acknowledging that they had no earthly reason to suspect him of a crime.  They searched his car illegally.  While he was being subjected to this humiliation, some of his white neighbors came to see what was going on.  Here are Stevenson’s words: “Neighbors were coming out. People were complaining about other burglaries in the neighborhood. They were asking the police to interrogate me about their missing items. You know, ask him if he has my vacuum cleaner, ask him if he took my cat. And it was sort of surreal and terrifying.”  When the police finally gave up and prepared to depart, Stevenson asked them to apologize for what they had done to him.  Their words: “Next time, we’ll get you.”

Stevenson has spent his career defending people on death row, mentally ill people convicted of crimes and incarcerated without proper care, and children who are tried and convicted as adults and then subjected to unfathomable abuse in prison. He has written a book called Just Mercy—I think maybe we all ought to read it.  It’s about the terrible need for reform of our justice system, and our troubling disregard, as a culture, for people whose sentences and sometimes even convictions are plainly wrong.  We allow people—especially we allow black people, poor people—to suffer extraordinary abuse and even execution because we lack the will to correct our laws and institutions.  And Bryan Stevenson, a committed Christian who studied at Philadelphia’s own Eastern University as an undergraduate, has the heart and soul and conscience and courage to be a spokesperson for those forgotten victims of our criminal justice system.  He is a force for redemption.

Picture young Bryan Stevenson that night outside his apartment, and imagine the sense of unreality he must have felt as the police and his own neighbors accuse him of crimes for no reason other than the color of his skin.  There’s a strong feeling of annihilation in this story, a wiping out of Stevenson’s whole reality, his whole social existence, everything he had accomplished and everything to which he aspired.  There is the very real danger that he could lose his life.  And at that moment, though he is too frightened to say much, he does his best to speak in a way that will reassure both himself and the police who are so sure that he is dangerous: “It’s ok.  It’s all right. It’s ok.  It’s all right.” 

A whole world opens up in this moment as Stevenson tries to speak.  He invests his speech with his very humanity, urgently trying to convey through words what and who he is.  He can barely get these short sentences out but he tries to fill them with his dignity and innocence.  He tries to convey that he understands where the police are coming from even though they have a gun to his head and are not listening to him.  He tries to communicate across a vast chasm: “You have nothing to fear.”

But the police and his white neighbors cannot hear him at all.  They have a story already about his guilt.  They have no room for a successful young black man in their neighborhood.  To the extent that they see him at all they see him in jail.  They don’t know that a whole world is opening up in front of them, a world in which his innocence and their racism are about to be exposed.  They don’t know that everything they cling to as respectable people is being called into question.  No one but Stephenson seems able to grasp that in the name of law and order and civil society they are just this side of pulling the trigger and committing murder.

That space that opens up that night in front of those white people could be their redemption.  If they could hear what Stephenson is saying—“It’s ok.  It’s all right”--the whole world could change. Though he can barely speak, Stephenson is speaking words of eternal life.  Words that bring his humanity before them.  Words that would force them to acknowledge who he is and what they are.  Words that would unravel them and open them up to God in another human being.

I know that when Jesus says “I am the bread of life” he doesn’t sound that much like Bryan Stephenson.  But I can promise you this: when Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” he is thinking about Stephenson, and about the people Stephenson defends, and about centuries of people like them, people who through a toxic combination of hatred and indifference are left to pay the price of injustice.  People who are simply disposable in the eyes of their neighbors.  And Jesus is also thinking about centuries of people who can’t and won’t hear the voices of the exploited, who won’t hear those words of life: “I am innocent.  I am human like you.  I am suffering unfathomable pain.  I Am.”

For many weeks now we have been hearing Jesus talk about being the bread of life.  We have explored his words from every angle.  We have paid his words deep respect, despite the fact that we don’t understand them.  Or maybe because we don’t understand them.  We come here day after day and kneel and receive the bread and the wine and we pledge ourselves to live in this state of not understanding.  I don’t know about you, but the more I hear Jesus saying that he is bread this summer, the more I feel that he is speaking to me across a chasm.  I’m not bread.  I don’t know what he means.  Outside the context of my faith, bread is something I buy and eat and sometimes waste. 

It’s clear that I’m not alone feeling this way.  His original followers were also put off when they heard him speak.  They left him.  His unbearable strangeness made them want to turn away.  And though we don’t hear about it in this chapter of John’s gospel, the people around Jesus are gradually turning against him.  Though they had seen something compelling in him, they are putting that attraction behind them and becoming indifferent to his words.  And gradually they will become more hostile.  He will go from being a fascinating teacher to being a disposable victim.  He will die an innocent death.  That will be an unremarkable reality for most of the people around him.

When Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” he speaks not only of his power to sustain us for all eternity, but of his willing surrender to the world’s indifference and hatred.  The two are intimately linked.  He speaks to us from that place of victimization and exploitation.  He speaks of forgiveness and redemption. And he opens our eyes to our own cruelty.  “Eat my flesh and drink my blood,” he says. “I am your victim. If you can hear me speak, a whole world will open up in front of you.  Your own salvation lies in your ability to admit your fear of me, and your hostility.” 

When Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” we may hear him in many different ways.  We come here to do just that, to hear him say “this is my body” and to explore that truth from every conceivable angle, week after week.  As we listen deeply to his words, let us be drawn to the people among us whose words seem not to matter at all.  Let Jesus abide in us, and draw us right to the side of those who are most disposable in our world, or those whose lives can become disposable on the turn of a dime.  To whom else would we go?

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

23 August 2015

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Going Nowhere

Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be going anywhere?  On the one hand, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, this summer has been uncommonly full of coming and going.  There have been vacations and honeymoons and family trips and departures and arrivals.  A wonderful group of Servant Year interns has disbanded now, and moved out of the rectory.  Even our special two, Ellen and James, have moved on to new adventures.   We are so fortunate that a new group will be arriving soon, and that Noah, who will serve as our new verger, is already here with us.  Matt Glandorf and Daryl Roland have both left us, a true loss, and now we are preparing to welcome Simon Thomas Jacobs.  A new chapter is beginning, and this is splendid news.  Mother Marie spent her last Sunday here with us last week, which I find just unthinkable, though I know this next chapter in her life will be a great blessing to her and to her family.

Yes, we have all been going places, for better or worse.  And the summer is flying by, and before we know it Pope Francis will be arriving and apparently residents of Philadelphia will be fleeing in droves as though it were Armageddon.  Apparently we can’t bear the fact that during that weekend there will be restrictions on travel.  I for one think it sounds like a foretaste of heaven to imagine this city without cars, and with an enormous, jubilant crowd celebrating the Eucharist on the Parkway.  I’d like the city to be like this every Sunday.  Get rid of all the cars!  Hold a gigantic Mass!  Best thing that ever happened in the City of Brotherly Love!  But all around me I hear choruses of Philadelphians singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” 

So yes, this is a very mobile community and we Americans are a mobile people, and this parish is constantly on the move.  Any restriction of our mobility makes us distinctly nervous.

But I’ve said we are going nowhere, and this is what I mean: no matter who comes and who goes, no matter where we all travel, in the Gospels for the latter part of this summer we just seem to be hearing over and over again that Jesus is the bread of life. 

Have you noticed?  I hope you have noticed.  If you haven’t yet you will soon.  Two weeks ago, on July 26, we began reading the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes.  Last week, we continued with the sixth chapter of John, and Jesus told us “I am the bread of life.”  This week, in in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus tells us he is the bread of life.  Spoiler alert: next week, in sixth chapter of John, Jesus will tell us he is the living bread that came down from heaven. That brings us to August 23, when Jesus will tell us that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood abide in him and he in them. Which is to say that he is the bread of life.  I bet you know what chapter that’s from.  For five weeks we are going nowhere while Jesus shows us and then tells us that he is the bread of life. 

Going nowhere.  It’s striking, isn’t it?  I’m thinking about proposing this as a motto for our parish: “Saint Mark’s, Going Nowhere.”  It’s so dynamic.  I can’t wait to share it with the Rector when he returns.  He’s going to love it.  

But really, why on earth would the church ask us to go nowhere this summer?  Why hold still for five weeks while Jesus talks about being bread?  Why fence us in like anxious Philadelphians deprived of our cars while the Bread of Heaven is being consecrated in our midst?  The liturgical year normally takes us on a journey from the birth of Christ through his earthly ministry, his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension.  Advent to Pentecost.  Why now, in ordinary time, are we asked to hold perfectly still as the narrative fails to advance and the Gospel grinds to a halt and Jesus stands before us repeating himself: “I am bread, I am bread, I am bread?”

Ian Morgan Cron, an Episcopal priest and writer, says in an interview that when he was about halfway through writing his most recent memoir he began to ask himself what it was that had held his life together through so many changes (http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/the-bread-and-the-wine).  He says he came to the realization that it was the Eucharist that was holding him together.  He saw that the moments of his life were like pearls, and he saw that the Eucharist was the string on which they were being threaded, one at a time.  Each Communion, each Mass he attended: his life was progressing forward one day at a time but the Eucharist was gathering those moments together in an unbroken chain of abiding in Christ. 

If we are fortunate enough to have been receiving Communion for many years, and especially if we take the opportunity to receive Communion daily, we too may become aware of this string of pearls that is our Eucharistic life with Jesus.  Each one holy and beautiful, full and round, moving forward in an unbroken chain.  The luster of each pearl reminding us of God’s radiant love.  Each one the same, constant, even as we grow and change and turn away and come back and sense God’s presence or fail to note it.  God feeding us again and again, always with the same care, the same urgency, the same kindness and concern.  “This is my body which is given for you.” 

And though we have gotten older and we have changed addresses and denominations and partners and hairstyles and careers, this feeding has never changed.  “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says to us when we are in despair.  And when we are joyful he says “I am the bread of life.”  And when we come to him filled with fear and doubt what he says to us is “I am the bread of life.” 

And in this unchanging string of pearls we are lifted up out of time.  “I will raise them up,” Jesus says, “on the last day.”  But the last day is already happening when we reach out our hands to receive the bread of life.  We are already being raised up into eternal life at that heavenly banquet.  Each Communion is a foretaste of the life to come, just as it is also a return to the days of the Passover and the manna that came down from heaven for the wandering people of Israel.  Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, we experience the Eucharist as a little bit of eternity here in our world of changing times.

Go where we will, in Jesus we are going (wonderfully) nowhere.  Because he feeds us with his own life in an unbroken succession of loving banquets, we are forever at his table.  No matter how uncertain our future, we know that our destination is that same lovely banquet we have been attending all along.  In the fullness of that banquet, in the unbroken luster of that presence, we can feel Jesus gathering us up, what we are, what we have been, what we will become.  Through change and loss and departures and arrivals, our fate is secure.  We abide in him and he in us.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Mother Nora Johnson

9 August 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia

Flesh and Blood

I’m guessing that we’ve all had the experience of having a sudden inability to remember what it is we’re supposed to be saying, of forgetting words that we’ve said a thousand times, stumbling over phrases that we know we know by heart. Without any warning, when we’re called upon to say them, we find that we suddenly can’t remember the words to the national anthem, or the Gloria or, occasionally in my case, the words of the collect for purity. Where once there was a well-established pattern of text, suddenly there is just an enormous blank page, and the more we think about it, the less likely we are to come up with the right combination of sounds and syllables to get that pattern started again.

One of my colleagues in seminary had this happen to her when she was serving as a new seminarian at a large church in D.C. She had only just begun her field education work there, and she was assigned to the chalice during their very large 11:00 Service of Holy Eucharist. She was nervous, a bit, trying to make sure she followed the right priest and paten, trying not to skip anyone, and, of course, desperately trying not to spill wine all down the front of someone’s Sunday best. She was so nervous, in fact, that she was several rows into her chalice-bearing that she realized that the words coming out of her mouth didn’t sound exactly right. When her brain finally tuned into what her mouth was doing, what she heard was horrifying. She was going down the row, person after person, sip after sip, saying, “The cup of blood. The cup of blood. The cup of blood.” But then once she heard what she was saying, she could of course in no way remember what she was supposed to be saying. The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation was as far away from her lips as the moon from Miami. So she just kept saying, “The cup of blood, the cup of blood, the cup of blood,” all the while apologizing in her heart for repeating this phrase that was so…well…gross.

Because gross it is, ladies and gentlemen, gross it is. It is a cup of blood that we’re offered at the altar, right after we’re fed from a heaping plate of flesh. In today’s Gospel passage that continues on in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus ups the ick factor considerably. He’s been talking for weeks now about bread: I am the bread of life, the bread that comes down from heaven, the true manna that gives eternal life. Bread, bread, bread. But now, just when everyone’s mouths are set to watering by all of this bread talk, Jesus throws in the zinger. I am the living bread that came down from heaven, he says, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. Er…eww… And he goes on, telling his listeners that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood – and not just eat and drink it like one might sip tea out of fine china with one pinky raised, but chew on it and gulp it down. His language is visceral here, raw. Take a big ol’ bite and a giant slug of me, he says, and we will abide together forever.

This kind of language is just trouble. It got Jesus in trouble then, as the religious leaders who heard this repulsive talk openly challenged him to explain himself. After all, what he was proposing was not only, well, gross, it also went directly against Levitical law, which contained clear prohibitions against drinking the blood of any animal, against forcibly taking an animal’s life force in this greedy and presumptive way. It got Jesus in trouble then, and it got his followers in trouble centuries later, as it led to Christian persecution based on false (but understandable) claims of cannibalism and bizarre stories of babies baked into communion bread. And it gets us in trouble now, when we find ourselves stumbling around our own theological language for what really happens at the altar. Like last week at our choir camp, when one of our youngest campers looked at me with wide eyes and said with all sincerity, “You shouldn’t drink blood. I don’t think it’s good for you.” I offered some thoughts about how all of this works – about wine and prayer and the real presence of Christ – but honestly, he looked less than convinced.

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t seem particularly concerned about explaining the mechanics of all of this. When the religious leaders ask aloud, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus answers them not with the how, but with the why. Take my flesh because then you will have life in you, because then you can have eternal life, be risen up on the last day, live forever. All good news indeed, but he just keeps pounding out that word – the flesh of the Son of Man, eat my flesh, my flesh is true food. Flesh, flesh, flesh. And is it just me, or is flesh is a word that just gives you the willies. You wouldn’t want a waiter to talk to you about the expertly seared flesh of the cow you were about to eat or the soft flesh of the salmon that’s being prepared for you. Call it a steak, please, or a filet – call it meat, maybe, but not flesh. Flesh is something that quivers or decays, something other and entirely unappetizing.

But flesh is the word Jesus uses here, and Jesus, of course, knows exactly what he’s doing. Because it was flesh that the Israelites craved in the wilderness, the fleshpots of Egypt that they missed with all of their leeks and garlic and meat. It was flesh that the Israelites longed for in the desert instead of just manna. And so Jesus tells his followers that not only is he the true bread that comes down from heaven like manna on the fields, but that his own flesh will satisfy their longings for rich, lasting food. All desires will be satisfied – bread and manna, flesh and meat.

But that word flesh also reminds us of something else – something early and new, a promise made in the prologue to John’s Gospel, that Jesus is not just a prophet or a healer or a feeder or a teacher but God made man – the Word become flesh, human, real, the stuff of you and me. And so when John tells us that Jesus offers us his flesh to eat, he is tying all of his great Gospel together, reminding us that the flesh and blood of the Eucharist is the same flesh and blood of the Incarnation. The flesh born in Bethlehem is the same flesh offered to you and me, on the cross and on the altar.

And this is beautiful. This is glorious. This is a message of powerful, potent hope, of light in the darkness, of God’s purpose being worked out in miraculous and humbling ways. And this is so utterly magnificent that the how of the flesh offered in bread and the blood offered in wine pales in the real presence of the wonder of it all. And Jesus invites us into the very heart of this great mystery – not just to observe it like a snapshot on Instagram but to sit down and to eat, to take this very mystery of God made flesh and flesh given freely into our own weak, undeserving flesh, to absorb this holiness into our own being, to digest it and let it fill us with energy and life. Jesus’ flesh and blood are true food and true drink, a pathway that opens the door for us to abide deeply in him and for him to abide deeply in us.

 And so sit and eat. Hear Jesus tell you to take his flesh and his blood, to take all of it. Eat every morsel and drain the cup to the dregs. Treat this meal less like a delicate sandwich offered on fine china at high tea and more like a hearty stew that you eat by the heaping spoonful and sop up with crusty brown bread. Take it – consume it all, and then come back tomorrow or the next day and consume it again. Find here something true and lasting to gnaw on, something well-aged and wondrous to gulp down. Open your own beautiful, fleshy body to the mystery of the incarnation and the Eucharist and let it abide there, deep within you, this great gift of God that frankly makes no earthly sense but that makes all the difference in the world. Feast on this flesh, on the scandalous self-offering of God and know that when we feel that sense of scandal or shock at what looks like too much love, or too great a gift, or too large a tent, or too intimate an embrace, it’s a pretty good sign that God is there, moving in the world, moving us, showing us what the kingdom of God actually looks like. True food and true drink. A plate of flesh. A cup of blood. Words and a meal to remember.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

16 August 2015

Saint Mark's, Philadelphia