"A Prayer to the God Who Fell..." Prop 16 B 2012

Melissa Campbell-Langdell

All Saints’, Oxnard + 8.26.12

Prop 16 B (1 Kings 8:22-30, 41-43; Ps. 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69)

So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go (John 6:67-68)?”

To whom can we go?  We come to church, and say, “How lovely is thy dwelling place,” and like Solomon we pray to God in the temple.  Somehow once we know Jesus, once his God-tendrils are deeply rooted in our hearts, we realize that we have nowhere else to go.  Nowhere else where we will find a home.

This “To whom can we go?” Reminded me of another question I wrestled with some years ago.  Sitting in a huge computer lab at the Pontífica Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, I stared at a computer screen.  Wireless was not in existence in Chile at that point and we called the World Wide Web the “World Wide Wait” because it could take five minutes to load a screen.  I often tried to practice meditative patience, having been used to Ethernet and comparatively fast speed in California and at college in New York. 

And here, after waiting for my Hotmail account to load, and then clicking on this particular e-mail from my former youth minister, I was faced with a hard answer.  “Only do it if you can’t do anything else.” 

The question I had posed was this: “How do I decide whether I am called to be a priest?”  And her answer flummoxed me!

Only do it if you can’t do anything else?  Well, of course I could do other things.  I was raised with a concept that you can do almost anything if you put your mind to it.  I knew that I had writing skills, people skills and other skills that could be applied to many different professions and vocations.  So what on earth did my mentor mean?  Eventually, it dawned on me.  She wasn’t talking about what I could physically do.  She meant “only do it if your heart can’t let you do anything else.” Only pursue this path if you are in love with this work, otherwise you will burn out or hurt the people of God trying to push your way into ministry. 
In the same way, Peter, talking to Jesus, doesn’t literally mean they can’t go to anyone else.  We saw them, at the beginning of the story, leaving family members, boats, and friends to join up with the Jesus band.  We know the disciples weren’t all orphans or social outcasts. 

They simply found a home in Jesus that they recognized as eternal.  Peter goes on to say to Jesus: “You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”  How can they go back?

They can’t, because they are in love with the home they have in Jesus.  No other home will seem quite right.  They can’t leave, even when Jesus says awfully disturbing things about eating his flesh. 
And this is true for us, too.  The Christian life is full of contradictions like this: we find a sense of home and a challenge in Jesus. Jesus will sometimes give us hard things to consider, but, like the Eucharist, what Jesus challenges us with may make us squirm, but they tend to give us life.  Because they are hard, some will wish to turn back, just like we see the less enamored disciples do in this passage today.  Some may want an easy faith, one that is black and white, something sanitary in which messy things like the flesh are not talked about!  They want something easy to digest, not an offer of life and vulnerability that makes them twitchy.  

If we learn to embrace Jesus’ fleshiness, his gift of his life, we start to accept our own vulnerability as well.  We are tied not just to God in Jesus in the Spirit, but we are also connected in the flesh. 

We acknowledge that this makes us imperfect at times but we accept God’s love and continue to follow, even when we find the lessons difficult or challenging. 

Jesus got down and dirty by sharing with us his own humanity—by being willing die for us, with us, in that deeply intimate sharing of self.  Sometimes I feel closest to Jesus thinking of him at the cross, comforting his mother and the beloved disciple.  Jesus didn’t even get a hospital bed for his goodbyes, but a cross. 
Jesus offers himself to us—and in his vulnerability—in that moment when the disciples might leave too, we are invited to humble and to be vulnerable alongside him.  With Peter, we may realize that with Jesus’ truth lodged in our hearts, we cannot leave. 

We may be vulnerable as Christians, life may be full of surprising and at times disturbing moments, but we are tied, linked to Him.   He is our home.  Where else can we go? 

 Let me finish with a poem that expresses this sentiment to me, “a Prayer to the God who fell from Heaven,” by John Shea:

If you had stayed

tightfisted in the sky

and watched us thrash

with all the patience of a pipe smoker,

I would pray like a golden bullet

aimed at your heart.

But the story says you cried

and so heavy was the tear

you fell with it to earth

where like a baritone in a bar

it is never time to go home.

So you move among us

twisting every straight line into Picasso,

stealing kisses from pinched lips,

holding our hand in the dark.

So now when I pray

I sit and turn my mind like a television knob

till you are there with your large, open hands

spreading my life before me

like a Sunday tablecloth

and pulling up a chair for yourself

for by now

the secret is out.

You are home.[1]

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[1] As posted at: http://orchardcommunity.blogspot.com/2010/12/god-who-fell-from-heaven.html.