May 29, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14-16 + 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 + John 6:51-58

The feasts of Pentecost, Trinity, and the Body and Blood of Christ belong together. The wisdom of our church in grouping them peals back layers of wonder about God’s Love and God’s presence. As I said on the Feast of Pentecost, what we celebrate these weeks before we settle into Ordinary Time is the wonder of three gifts: each unique yet part of God’s self gift to us. Reflection on them individually and collectively leads us deeper in the mystery of God’s presence and plan for our salvation.

That first gift of the Spirit awaked us to a world outside our expectations, outside the boundaries of our culture and language; outside our locked up rooms, gates, and fears.

The second from last week’s Feast of the Trinity is the Gift of Relationship. Healthy, human growth, physical, emotional, and spiritual is impossible without human contact. Our joy on the feast of the Trinity is that God has invited us in, into the dynamic life-giving relationship of a family where accepted as we are in love, we may grow to become what we are called to be: children of God, heirs of the heaven, and brothers and sisters of Jesus.

The third of these great gifts is ours to ponder today: The Gift of Nourishment.

At the end of the Second World War, young boys recruited as children into the Gestapo were without and food and shelter, lost from their families, and totally helpless when the war suddenly ended and the institution that fed them collapsed. In tent cities and bombed out buildings, doctors and nurses worked with them to restore their mental, emotional, and physical health.

In that image, think of the gift of Spirit, of Relationship, and Nourishment.

It seems that many of the boys would awaken several times during the night screaming in terror. One doctor had an idea for handling their fears. After serving the boys a hearty meal, he would tuck them into bed with a piece of bread in their hands that they were told to save until morning. The boys began to sleep soundly after that because, after so many years of hunger and uncertainty about their next meal, they finally had the assurance of food for the next day.

In a few moments, you will put out your hand and receive bread

that you know is more than the answer to your prayers for “daily bread.”

You will put out your hands to receive a gift that can keep you from worry and fear about tomorrow, a gift that can quiet restless nights and quiet fearful dreams.

It is a gift that holds at bay the demons of fear and want, and lets you live serenely each day and sleep soundly through each night.

The gift of this bread however does not come without challenge. The offer of this bread or “flesh for the life of the world” caused consternation, dissent and divisions among his contemporaries. They questioned and quarreled over it and some parted company. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke the reference is always to “food and drink”. In John it is “flesh and blood”, a startling and troubling difference for the Jews of his time. Eating flesh and drinking blood were as abhorrent to Jews as the notion of cannibalism would be to us. Yet in the Jewish writings, flesh and blood were the way of describing human life, meaning the real person. And so we must hear this gospel with all the intended meaning of the scriptures,

and not be tempted to distance ourselves from the reality of what Jesus says

by sacramentalizing or turning this into something that is just a sign or a symbol.

This is where we meet the Jesus of the cross, the risen Christ and the exalted Lord for all eternity. We meet and we commune with one another in the hallowed presence of God. We are lost in the Spirit of that God, commune in the relationship of Love that is the Trinity, and in our own flesh in our own blood, and in our own lives, that God takes flesh again. This is the Eucharist, the continual, on going, incarnation of God’s human presence, the church.

In a few moment, you will put out your hand to receive this gift.

If you believe what you accept, you will not be the same.

This Eucharist does not invite us to “imitate” Christ.

It is not a proposal that we copy the actions of Jesus – it does not suggest that we ask “What would Jesus do?”, but rather it proposes that we imitate his relationship with God and then because of that relationship we will do the right thing, the Will of God.

Jesus proclaimed a new way of life based upon a new relationship with the Father.

He did not propose a new set rules. He gave a new relationship out of which we might begin to live. In that relationship we shall discern the will of God and act upon it, because that is true righteousness. Saying, “Lord, Lord” will get us no where. Even doing mighty works is not the point, no matter how good they are. Only doing the will of God is what matters, and that is only possible for those who live an intimate relationship with God: as intimate as flesh and blood.

In this Year of the Eucharist, proclaimed by our late Holy Father John Paul,

our challenge is not so much to do something

as it is to become something; and that is a lot more difficult.

So, put out your hands and say, “Amen.”

But not for a piece of bread or a sip of wine.

Say it for a new life; a new way of life.

May 15, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Acts 2:1-11 + 1 Corinthians 12:3-7&12-13 + John 20:19-23

In the next three weeks, we shall celebrate three gifts:

The Gift of the Spirit The Gift of Relationship The Gift of Food

The Church calls these: Pentecost

Holy Trinity Corpus Christi in the old language, and Body and Blood of Christ in today’s.

It is Paul in that first letter to the Corinthians who makes this week’s gift most obvious. He insists that the Spirit is given to each member of the community not just a few leaders or gifted prodigies.   

All are gifted not for their own personal enjoyment or enlightenment,

but for the good of all.  Yet somehow in our competitive driven world, it is always the gifts of other that get our attention

either by way of admiration or by way of envy.

Knowledge of the gifts of others may enrich our lives from time to time, especially when their gifts are used for the good of all.

But ignoring our own gifts because we have our eye on the gifts of others is not just foolish. It is wrong. It robs us of life, and it diminishes the glory and generosity of God. The opportunity we have this week from the Word we proclaim is not to sit here and imagine what happened in Jerusalem a long time ago; nor guess what tongues of fire look like, or how that language thing worked.

This day is about gifts, our gifts, and not just those seven we memorized at the time of our Confirmation. It is about the gifts we often take for granted, or wrongly assume are just for us for our comfort, entertainment, or security.

The Corinth Paul writes to could just as well be Norman, Oklahoma.

It was a wealthy place. It was full of pretty people who looked good, had a lot of stuff, and were very, very comfortable and secure when they were not worried about how to keep it all.

They were a people who were smart, educated, had options, and used them. Paul was writing to you and me. He writes to any people who have come to faith; to people who say: “Jesus is Lord.”

But for his contemporaries saying those three words amounted to treason. To publicly proclaim Jesus as “Lord” is to declare that Caesar is NOT! So, we are left to wonder what it means for us,

for people who put those words on bumper stickers, banners, and bracelets.

That proclamation is not about an idea, it announces a way of life.

It does not describe Jesus nearly as much as it says who we are,

how we live our lives, define our values, and inform our decisions.

Just as much today as it was then, saying that “Jesus is Lord”

may cost us our jobs, some relationships, some prestige in the eyes of others. It will mean we see things differently than others,

value different things, and use our time and all our gifts first of all for others since we know they have not been given to us for anything other than the good of all.

We will begin to get the point when the teachings of Jesus Christ show up in our lives not as ideals to strive for but as principles and values by which we live now. To think of them as ideals is to build ourselves an excuse for not embracing them now. We have no excuse. We have no reason for settling for less or pretending that what Jesus has given us, taught us, and shown us is beyond human reach.

If we dare to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, then we know and acknowledge that what we have in faith makes all things possible:

Justice, Peace, Charity, Forgiveness,.. it’s all there. It is not beyond our reach. These things are all the consequence of living as if Jesus was Lord. They are the consequence of living with the wisdom and the knowledge that all we have is pure gift, and not one of those gifts is our own. What a difference it shall make when we all get that right! On that day, we shall truly be able to say:

Christ has died. Christ is Risen.Christ HAS come again.

May 8, 2005 At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Acts 1:1-11 + Ephesians 1:17-23 + Matthew 28:16-20

In spite of our privacy fences and gated communities, security codes and monitored security systems, boundaries of geography or politics mean less and less these days. The world is shrinking. While we tighten our boarders to keep some out, we wave others through with a wink and glance the other way to fill low paying jobs. For anyone who has traveled abroad in the last ten years, the boarders between ancient countries in Europe are now simply signs on “auto routes” and “auto bhans” like signs to our north that say: “Welcome to Kansas.” Boundaries mean little. They are in flux all the time.

What separates us is artificial and sometimes it is imposed by incomplete understanding. This fact sunk into my mind this month as I have read an interesting book about the Versailles Treaty and the consequences of the First World War. Most of our political and national strife in the past fifty years finds its origins in the lines the western allies drew on maps in 1919. They just didn’t get it.

With incomplete understanding, worn out from the violence and killing of that war, they rushed to settle things with boundaries that failed to take into consideration many factors of history, language, ethnic and tribal communities. Iraq is just one of the consequences of boundaries they made up in 1919. Boundaries between people are in flux. What separates us is totally artificial.

The Ascension of the Lord is about what unites us and tells the story of how God feels about boundaries. While told in Biblical language and with biblical images, what is really going on here is the breaking of a boundary. Christ’s ascension is the dissolution of the last boundary that keeps us from what we are called to be and from where we are called to be. What that early church discovered after the resurrection was that where God was concerned, there were no more boundaries. As Paul put it after he caught on: “no more Jew, no more Greek, no more male nor female.”

The communities themselves discovered this when the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles began to collapse as the inclusive nature of the Lord’s Table and the Gospel message was appreciated.

It all began as the biggest of all boundaries came down on the day of the Annunciation when young Mary in Nazareth said yes to the divine visitor who came to announce the end of the boundary.

“The Word was Made Flesh”. The boundary between heaven and earth was ended with the Incarnation when God crossed the boundary between heaven and earth. When the perfect obedience of His Son was complete, the last remnant of that boundary came down in a moment more powerful than the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the “Iron Curtain”. A human being crossed the boundary of death to life and of earth to heaven. With that, it was all over for walls, boundaries, fences, and anything else that keeps people apart and people from God.

This is what we celebrate today in our Christian tradition,

the crossing of the boundary, the end of the limits, the collapse of anything that keeps us from the presence of God.

And so, what matters today, in our lifetime, in this age of history

is not what separates us, but what unites us: our life in God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. We cannot be faithful to Christ and this plan of God and willingly settle for boundaries that divide and separate.

As he crossed the last boundary, the risen Christ who had already left behind the boundaries of human flesh and blood gave a final instruction and mandate to those who would follow him across the divide. They were to translate words into works, decisions into deeds,

and goals into achievements. Cheap talk was to become precious action. There were walls to take down, fences to remove, bridges to mend, and a divine plan for creation to complete. It is our mission,

our purpose in life, and it becomes more than our vision,

it becomes our very identity, who we are and what we are:

healers, forgivers, builders, disciples – regardless of the name or what we are called, the mission is the same.

As we stand between the two advents of God, we are not called to stand back and critique the world. We are sent into it to prepare

for the final perfection of this world as the Paradise, Heaven, the Kingdom of God.

May 1, 2005

At Saint Mark Church in Norman, OK

Acts 8:5-8,14-17 + 1 Peter 3:15-18 + John 14:15-21

“Notebook” is the name of a movie released this past year that drifted through my mind as I sat with these verses of John’s Gospel through the past week. Sometimes the complexity, the developing theology,  the profound and unique Christology of John’s Gospel

allows us all to slip past the simplicity and sheer poetry of the verses. Had I not watched that film one evening with these verses of John’s Gospel fresh in my mind, I probably would have missed it altogether. These verses are really a poem for lovers.

They reflect a unique style of love rooted in intimacy and profound care. Those whose only experience of love is fleeting infatuation or sexual attraction will never get it; but those who have discovered in love the bonding of companionship and union recognize that these verses literally sing of union and peace of love and joy. This kind of love the poet John is writing about possess four qualities:

obedience, companionship, revelation and union.

Unfortunately in our culture and language, the word Obedience carries far too many meanings, because having lost our knowledge of the root of words we often fail to rediscover their authentic meaning.

In the context of Love, and religion for that matter, “Obedience” is not about following orders nearly as much as it is about listening, about the ability to be open to listen to the authentic invitations for life and respond in a way that is consistent with our own identity.

The root meaning, and so virtue of Obedience is about listening and responding.

Companionship heralds the authentic commitment of love. When there is love, there is commitment, and in this commitment, the focus is the other, their well-being, the desire to help them grow.

The miracle of this love is that two individuals who have first cared only for themselves and have seen themselves as individuals begin to protect, touch, and think only of another. Then in this authentic gospel love, there is revelation that means transparency and vulnerability based on trust. When someone discovers that they are cared for, they risk revealing more of themselves.

This love that Jesus speaks of to those who choose a life style fit for the Kingdom of God is inclusive. It is not experienced and expressed in the same depth by everyone, but it is seen in people joined together in obedience, companionship. They care for one another, and in that caring, God is revealed.

The love our poet writes of today is the love we find at the heart of our lives. Our knowledge of God and God’s love comes to us through our experience of love in creation; in the experience of loving and being loved by the other. Husbands and wives know this best of all, and for that reason, their experience of love is a Sacrament that reveals God’s love and makes them one with God.

Children know this love from their experience of loving parents

who give them the freedom to grow without fear because they are cared for, protected with a love that is truly sacrificial.

The wonder of God’s love is that it does not ask us to choose between God and the other. It asks us to choose God through the other. Our very ability to live in obedience, companionship, revelation and union with ourselves and others is founded on and strengthened by God’s love.

In the film, Notebook, a wife of many years suffers from dementia,

and she has lost all recognition of her loved ones except for brief moments when her memories are ignited by a loving spouse

who reads to her every day from his journal. There are brief and fleeting moments of recognition that give him reason to live in the nursing home with her, treasuring those memories and moments of “obedience” and companionship. This is a metaphor of God’s love for us, the story of God’s patient willingness to live with us,

to retell and to remember the story of our love over and over;

because from time to time we wake up and remember, restore and celebrate the covenant we have made and share.

The poem of this day’s Gospel speaks of that love, of the promise of presence in a relationship of obedience, companionship, revelation, and unity. For this love we have reason to rejoice today,to give thanks,because we are cared for and protected with a love that is truly sacrificial.