Preaching texts: Proverbs 9:1-6, Ephesians 5:15-20, John 6:51-58
If you ask a scientist, a biologist, an anthropologist, just about anybody really, what it is that differentiates human beings from other animals, you’ll get a variety of answers. It’s our adaptability. It’s our capacity for language. It’s our ability to craft and use tools. It’s a lot of things, but they all boil down to one simple idea. It’s our intelligence. We simply are smarter than the average bear.
Which to me is sometimes funny, because there are a lot of ways in which we humans, despite this lauded intelligence, are really really stupid. We’re stupid because we’re stubborn. We want the world to be the way we want it to be. We want to be right. And when evidence is presented, even overwhelming evidence, that the world is not the way we think it is and that we are wrong about something, we just dig in our heels and trumpet our ignorance all the louder.
Consider one of the recent controversies that’s been in the news. After the Charleston church shooting, there’s been a lot of debate over the Confederate flag. The African-American community and others are saying it’s a racist symbol. Others disagree; they say it's a symbol of Southern pride and heritage, that the Civil War was not about race, but about states’ rights and economic disparity and cultural differences.
Well, if we were to invite 100 historians to discuss this issue, they would come in and they’d sit down as historians are wont to do with the actual documents of the time when the Confederacy was formed. That nation was formed by politicians and, as we all know, politicians love to give speeches and have press releases. So there’s a lot of talk from that time about why they did what they did. And time and time and time again, we’ll read in those documents and the vast majority of those historians (say 90%) would confirm all this, that the reason the Confederacy existed was for the continuation of slavery and the subjugation of the black race.
If 90 out of 100 car mechanics said that the reason your car doesn’t run is because it needs a new alternator, you’d replace the alternator. If 90 out of 100 doctors said you have appendicitis and need to have surgery, you’d be having surgery. But if 90 out of 100 historians say the Confederacy was all about slavery and that its flag is absolutely the symbol of a racist nation, no, these people don’t know what they’re talking about.
Like it or not, it's about racism. Period.
Climate change is another hot button issue, another controversy. The world is growing warmer and climate and weather are going all wonky on us. Hotter summers! More extreme winters! Violent hurricanes! Record droughts! All of it, according to some 97% of all climate scientists, the result of human activity: agriculture, carbon fuels, etc. But our political class, all well bribed...I mean with their campaigns well funded...by the oil and gas industries, say it’s all a hoax. And a lot of people believe them.
If 97 out of 100 car mechanics said that the reason your car doesn’t run is because it needs a new alternator, you’d replace the alternator. If 97 out of 100 doctors said you have appendicitis and need to have surgery, you’d be having surgery. But if 97 out of 100 climatologists say that global warming is both real and we’re the cause of it, no, it’s just a conspiracy. It’s all a hoax. It’s all fake.
Say hello to the world we're leaving our children.
We can be so dumb.
We’ve got these anti-vaxxers out there that are putting people in danger of diseases that we’ve nearly eradicated. We’ve got people who still believe our President was born in Africa despite the mountain of evidence that he is, in fact, a citizen of these United States. We’ve got folks that think the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 was an inside job. We are so stupid at times.
The author of Proverbs calls us to feast upon wisdom, to set aside immaturity and folly. St. Paul calls us to live not as unwise, but as wise. Sometimes, I think they’re spitting into the wind. It’s tall order to ask stubborn and often willfully stupid people to give up their stubbornness and stupidity. We’re addicted to being right, even when we’re not.
And probably nowhere in the course of our lives are we more stubborn than when it comes to matters of faith. There’s something, if you’ll forgive my putting it this way, almost devilish in the way Jesus approaches his critics in our Gospel lesson today. If he were on the internet, we’d probably say he was trolling them with his talk of eating flesh and drinking blood. He’s going for shock value.
You see, Jesus’ critics, the Pharisees, the rabbis, the scribes, and all the religious leaders of the day were very set in their ways. They understood God. They knew what it was all about. But along comes the very Son of God, who knows the Father better than anyone, who offers a new perspective, a new relationship with the divine, a new communion, if you will. And to describe that new reality, he uses a violent image of cannibalism and vampirism, eating flesh and drinking blood.
It’s even harsher in the original language than it comes across in English. Those who “eat” of my flesh. In the old Greek, the word for “eat” used there is not one that conjures up a dainty little meal where everyone has good manners and proper use of posture and utensils. No, it translates best as “gnaw.” Those who gnaw on my flesh. Those who devour my flesh. It’s more the image of a starving man having food set before him for the first time in days.
So it’s not an easy image to digest (pun intended). But there’s truth within the image. But rather than listen to Jesus or to try to understand what he’s saying here, the Pharisee crowd will have none of it. They know what God’s all about. No one, not even God’s own Son, is going to change their minds.
Of course, it’s this very attitude that makes Jesus say what he says. This is the problem. The Pharisees want things their way. They want to cling to their old priorities, their old attitudes, their old opinions, their old theologies and doctrines.
But with Jesus, if you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. There’s no halfway point in this new reality. No compromise. You either accept the new way or you cling to the old. You’re either feasting upon Christ and in this new communion with God or you’re not in it at all.
We humans like our halfway point. We like our compromises. We like clinging to our follies, our preconceptions, our sins. We’re not so different from those Pharisees as we’d like to pretend to be. Love your neighbor! Bah! Not those people! Not the poor. Not the black. Not the gay. Not those sinners over there. They don’t deserve it. They haven’t earned it. Give of my resources to help people! Bah! It’s mine! You can’t make me. Surrender my hardened heart and my foolish ignorance about the world! No way! I’m right even when I’m not.
In for a penny, in for a pound. This new reality, this new kingdom, demands everything of us. We are to be new creations, ones who feast upon Christ and his goodness. Who devour his love. Who gnaw on his grace. And ones who surrender the old ways of hate and selfishness. But that asks too much of us. We’re too caught up in our own folly to let it go. Too stubborn to stop being stupid.
So what is Christ to do with us?
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. If that is the demand, then Christ will be the one who fulfills it. It will be he who gives all. It will be he who surrenders everything. It will be he who sacrifices the whole of himself for the sake of the world. To do what we cannot do.
In order to gnaw on Christ’s flesh, he must die. And die he does, upon a cross, for the sake of the world. For the sake of all the stubborn and willfully foolish human beings like ourselves. We cannot make ourselves a new creation even if we wanted to. No, God will do it for us and the price is the life of the Son. He will die so we can feast upon him. He will die to be with us. He will die so that we can have this new communion with God and be the creations he wishes us to be.
We cannot give up our stupidity. Even the wisest or most humble of us will succumb to sin and ego at some point. We cannot be the new creation on our own. We cannot have this new communion with God on our own. God must do it for us and do it he does. He gives of himself, his very life, for our sake. You want to talk about dumb? That seems dumb. We’re not worth it. We’ve proven that time and again. But to God, we are. Stupid we may be, but he loves us and he gives himself to save us. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment