Prop 12 B + Complicated humanity + ACL + 7.28.24

 

Complicated Humanity
Proper 12B, John 6, Ephesians 3


St Paul’s Emmanuel, Santa Paula/ All Saints’ Oxnard, July 28, 2024
The Rev. Alene Campbell-Langdell

Eric Minton, in his book It’s Not You, It’s Everything, tells the story of learning for the first time after his great-aunt’s death that her professed beliefs about drinking and gambling did not always match the way she lived.  As he wrestles in the book with his sense of betrayal at this dichotomy between her beliefs and her life, he begins to recognize how the desire to appear perfect oneself or expect perfection from others is a form of violence.  He writes,

[My Southern Baptist tradition] never taught me how to be okay with my own and the world’s profound inconsistencies.  It never helped me become a person, because people are complicated…. [C]ondensing life, people, faith, or even a God who became human into something consumable that we can immediately accept or reject, love or condemn, believe in or doubt…[is] ‘a form of violence’ in which we never allow ourselves to gracefully become—as I was by the life of my own great-aunt—"overwhelmed by their complexity.”[1]

He goes on to note that the call to be “perfect” like our heavenly Father in Matthew 5:48 is better translated as “complete.” 

Even the word for “perfect” in Hebrew, Jesus’ religious mother tongue, is the word shalom, which, loosely translated, connotes this same sense of peace, completeness, and at-home-ness with the world.  Be complete, be okay, be at peace with a complicated world, therefore, as your heavenly parent is complete, okay, and at peace with a complicated world.[2]


 

I don’t know about you, but I live in a world where people are complicated, humanity is complicated, the world is complicated.  I kind of want to start every discussion I have about the news or the people in my life with the caveat, “It’s not that simple!”  And yet, it’s also hard to live in a world where nothing falls into simple boxes.  And this isn’t a new phenomenon.  Our passage from Ephesians today culminates the first half of the book in a soaring, beautiful prayer about love.  This prayer follows a discussion about how Christ has brought Jews and Gentiles together into one family.  The love of Christ has done what no one thought possible and brought peace between communities who hated each other. 

Some scholars have suggested that today’s reading from Ephesians, this beautiful prayer, may have been borrowed from a baptismal liturgy in use at the time.  As I read it, I hear echoes of another prayer we pray every Sunday, the one Jesus taught to his disciples.  We don’t know what source or sources the author used for this particular prayer, but if you’ll bear with me a moment, I’d like to explore the possibility that the Lord’s Prayer might have been one of those sources.  The prayer begins with the author bowing the knee before the Father of “every family in heaven and earth” (Ephesians 3:15).  God’s Spirit dwells in us to do God’s work in the world and Christ becomes our daily bread dwelling in our hearts.  There is a depth and nuance to reading these two prayers in parallel that I highly recommend.  Yet, if you lay the two prayers out in parallel to each other, the phrase “lead us not into temptation” parallels the prayer for the Ephesians to “have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18-19).  At first glance, avoiding temptation and comprehending the love of Christ do not seem terribly related.  However, recall the context of this Ephesians passage.  Here are two communities who have been brought together despite centuries of enmity.  What if the author of this prayer is saying that the temptation for the Ephesians (and perhaps us) is to limit Christ’s love?  We need to catch a glimpse of how big and all-encompassing it is.  We need to have our breath taken away by its vastness.  We need to be humbled by its ability to reach even those we think are outside the possibility of love. 


 

I’m intrigued by the crowd in the Gospel story.  Here, the crowd is just following Jesus around hoping for more miracles.  Who are they? And why are these people just standing around waiting for food to be handed to them?  It makes me wonder about the crowds we see today.  What draws them?  Sports events, political rallies, concerts.  These crowds are not pious, but then, neither were the crowds in these stories.  The crowds are simply there and in need. 

Through this lens we may begin to understand that strange moment in the Gospel story when Jesus slips away from the crowd, not because they want to kill him, as in other stories, but because they want to make him King.  We may wonder, in our post-Christendom perspective, what is so wrong with that?  Don’t we have a Sunday every year in which we celebrate Christ the King?  But what if the temptation to make Christ a King is a temptation precisely because it makes the work and the love of Christ too small?  In our complicated human context today half of the country believes the other half is actively seeking to destroy everything we hold dear. Does our prayer to not be led into temptation mean remembering that we are not in control of who gets fed?  Because if we are the ones who make Christ King, we maintain control--the power and the kingdom belong to us.  We become one more entertainment no different than any other spectacle or bid for power.  We control who gets fed and who doesn’t. 

Perhaps that is why it is so clear in this story how small our gift is. “What are these [five barley loaves] among so many people?” (John 6:9).  If the temptation on the one hand is to make Christ’s love too small, the temptation on the other is probably to make ourselves too big.  We are not the ones who will feed the crowd.  God is.  We are not the ones who will bring reconciliation and completeness to this complicated humanity.  God is.  We simply bring what we’ve been given.  A small percentage of our money in the offering plate.  A bit of food.  A kind word.  It’s ridiculously small to feed the hunger of the world, and that’s the point.  


 

This message of love, this bread Jesus offers, is for everyone.  There are no insiders or outsiders—no one who has somehow gained perfection.  The only power that belongs in Christ’s kingdom is the power of love.  And that love is so all-encompassing that in the words of the Psalmist it satisfies “the desire of every living thing” (145:16).  For in the end, we are the ones who need to sit on the grass and be fed. We may feel anxious for a minute, as Philip does, wondering how so many will be fed. But we trust, that when God has filled us with this love that is beyond our comprehension, our small offering will be enough.  We trust that not only will we be fed, but we will find ourselves at peace--at peace with our own complicated humanity, and with the rest of our neighbors as well.  Amen.

 



[1] Eric Minton (2022). It’s not you, It’s everything: What our pain reveals about the anxious pursuit of the good life. Broadleaf Books: Minneapolis, MN, Pp 159-160.

[2] Minton, It’s not you, 167.

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