Sermon, by Pastor Ronald Nelson
Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
August 18th, 2024
Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:1-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58
(Twentieth Sunday in ordinary time,
Turtle island)
We are dealing with a decidedly and unmistakable Eucharist IC motif these Sundays, and not offering communion makes it a tough call at best and just plain hard for me as the preacher.
I looked back at our last red hymnal [service book and hymnal] published in 1958. The way they handled this situation then was to have one set of lessons used year after year and to almost completely ignore the Gospel of John. Before I was an ordained pastor, I could lead worship and preach sermons without worrying over the lack of communion services. In fact in the summer of 1963, two years before I was ordained, I did just that for three months. As I have said before, if we had continued in that mode of ignoring much of scripture and having communion often only four times a year, I doubt I would be preaching today. It is also interesting that Dr. Karoline Lewis in her writings on the gospel of John said, “my commentary on chapter 6 has deliberately postponed a discussion on communion. Why? Because it does not include in its writings, the words of institution, etc.” So with Dr. Lewis’s blessing I will struggle with these texts as we do not again have communion today?
Having gotten that off my chest, let us move on then with the lessons. As a prelude to the Gospel today, the first reading from proverbs sets the tone. David f. Ford said, “wisdom has on the whole not had an easy time in the recent centuries in the west, yet it may be making a comeback.” The wisdom texts of Hebrew scriptures address the practices of ordinary life more than the great events of history. Why? Because they attend to those who suffer.
Therefore, in our times of great suffering and the superpowers’ indifference to ordinary life, it may be a good time to think again about wisdom. L’Arche, in spite of its leader’s transgressions, is an example of wisdom listening to the needs of god’s people. Wisdom, in our text today, is personified as a gracious hostess, who prepares a feast and offers it freely to all who have sense enough to accept her invitation. But the most striking characteristic of this account is the importance it gives to women. [just think of the two leaders of the republican party and what they say about women and yet most of their supporters profess to being Christian. Go figure!] Wisdom invites, cajoles, and persuades - it never commands.
No one can survive without wisdom, the way of wisdom is the way to the understanding of life. In John’s gospel we find Jesus as the wisdom incarnate. Then Ephesians continues to talk about how believers should conduct themselves at the communities’ gatherings. What these readings then are doing is giving us some guidelines as to how we conduct ourselves not only at worship but in the world. Now what we have in today’s scripture lessons and in fact on any given Sunday is contradictory characteristics of the writers’ various theologies. So, for instance, the old SBH I just mentioned, was not honest in almost totally ignoring the gospel of John, and neither are non-liturgical pastors who keep riding their same “hobby horses” Sunday after Sunday. So if we were to follow proverbs and never use the book of Job, we would be doing the same thing. Biblical wisdom is often portrayed as predicting what God would do. In that mode, we can always predict that God will always give me everything “I” need, “especially a long and meaningful life.” But if I ignore god’s specific rules and regulations I and my descendants will live miserably and die young. If that is true, what about the book of Job? No matter how well Job “a just man” adhered to God’s laws, he always got the dirty end of the stick. Everything went against him. He and his family were constantly punished. I am sure we have all known people like that, in fact it might be us. We have done everything right and yet we have suffered. Thus in Job we find there is no predictability in God’s actions. Even when Yahweh eventually appears to Job, Job’s questions are never answered. Basically God says, “I am divine and you are not. You will never understand why I do what I do, so stop worrying about it.” Is it any wonder that Rabbi Kushner made big dollars in 1981 with his book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” But today our readings all come down on the side of proverbs. The author of proverbs pictures a great banquet, providing food and drink that takes care of our thirst and hunger for a lifetime.
The writer of John puts some of the same wisdom in the mouth of Jesus, when Jesus speaks about, what some of us would say, is “the Eucharist.”
And then John’s Jesus takes the effects of food and drink beyond his life into eternity. Even the writer of Ephesians seems to assure his readers that if they revolve their lives around doing the will of God, things are guaranteed to go well with them for the rest of their lives. Now I am sure that is what you would like me to say, right? But what I am about to say is, our faith is not, or at least should not be, simply a matter of black and white. I think the Lutheran church finally began to get our theology on the Eucharist right in the 1970’s when we began to understand what Paul and his students were saying about the Eucharist rather than when we just tried to ignore the gospel of John and hoped people would not ask about communion. [“Visible Words” by Robert w. Jenson is a good example, of how we began to get it right.] For me as I look at these lessons there comes forward a subtle but meaningful practice at communion. The way I, as a pastor, and the assisting minister do it, and I think Pastor Joel does the same, we eat and drink after everyone else has eaten. In other words in the Eucharist we, like those feeding the 5000, symbolically, only eat when everyone else in the community has eaten. To be a disciple is to be a servant like Jesus was. Jesus put the needs of others ahead of his own. Discipleship means to offer one’s time, talent and treasure as food for the many hungers of god’s people. Yes, if we are to be disciples we must have a capacity for compassion that overcomes conceit and self-centeredness with concerns for others.
We Lutherans used to argue that we had to have some kind of scholarship understanding of the Eucharist before we could partake of it. Finally, as I mentioned above, we began to understand that first Corinthians 11 was not talking about knowledge, but about our failing to share the food [bread and wine] with everyone at the table. The basic idea is that the hungry should be fed by you and me. Without that as part of our mandate then the liturgy of word and sacrament is incomplete. Paul understood and hopefully we do as well. Only when the poor are well fed by the generosity of the assembled community is the Eucharist complete. Raymond E. Brown’s “The Gospel According to John,” suggests that the whole of John 6 reflects the liturgical setting of a Christian Passover-Paschal feast which remembered; the gifts of the manna in the wilderness, the loaves and the fish in Galilee, and Jesus’ death on the cross. All within the context of a Eucharist IC celebration.
Sadly, we Christians have missed the mark on carrying out most of what Jesus tried to teach. We had crusades to kill the infidels, we killed witches, and we privatized our faith to the point that “saving our soul” was all that counted and worst of all, we justified the above and much more by wrongly citing scripture. The writer of Ephesians said, “watch carefully how you live, not as foolish persons, but as wise… do not continue in ignorance.” So we as Lutherans especially continue to struggle with the meaning of the Eucharist. All is a matter of faith, not logical or scientific fact. We can only grasp it through the wisdom of faith. We do this by witnessing in awe and wonder before god, speaking and doing no evil, dedicating ourselves to good works, and pursing peace in our lives. We as Christ-bearers must offer our whole selves to others, and to God’s wise plan for justice and peace in the world. For me the bottom line of all of this is that God comes to us because we do not know how to go to her. We are connected to one another. We are all family. The human family is one flesh, and whatever happens to anyone of us happens to all of us. Any attempt to divide the human family is an attack on all of us. The war in the Ukraine is a “good/bad” example. Oppression and exploitation of many will always eventually afflict everyone.
Justice and the common good are the only antidote to global suffering and sickness. It is rather simple and easy to go to church and to receive the bread and the wine. But it is another thing to actually be the church and experience life around us. Each week I want to do what the Rev. Marbury Anderson did for me as my pastor in the 1960’s. I was 25 and about to be ordained when Pastor Anderson wrote the following for 8th graders in 1965: “during this course, when you are probing the significance of Christ in your life, remember that your church is not interested in giving you a lot of trite answers to your questions about being good, about life, death, and eternity. Instead, your church wants you to read, study, and think for yourselves, to let the Holy Spirit so increase your faith in Christ that you find those answers that are meaningful to your life.” I understand proverbs as being like a mother who always wants to first comfort her child. My mother was like that, but then she would talk to me about some of her “Job” like trials. One trial she had was, she had multiple sclerosis and yet she lived to be 92. I will be honest, every time I have a pain, I wonder if I have not inherited MS from my mother.
As I share the above two experiences with you, I say to me and I say to you.
Come and seek the ways of wisdom,
She who danced when earth was new.
Follow closely what she teaches,
For her words are right and true.
Wisdom clears the path to justice,
Showing us what love must do.
Listen to the voice of wisdom,
Crying in the market place.
Hear the word made flesh among us,
Full of glory, truth, and grace.
When the word takes root and ripens,
Peace and righteousness embrace.
Sister wisdom, come, assist us,
Nurture all who seek rebirth.
Spirit guide and close companion,
Bring to light our sacred worth.
Free us to become your people,
Holy friends of god and earth.
[ACS 971]
Listening to this wisdom,
We will begin to understand
Build a longer table, not a higher wall,
Feeding those who hunger, making room for all,
Feasting together, stranger turns to friend,
Christ breaks walls to pieces,
False divisions end.
Build a broader doorway, not a longer fence.
Love protects all people, sparing no expense.
When we embrace compassion more than fear,
Christ tears down our fences:
all are welcome here.
[ACS 1062 v. 1& 3]
Amen.
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