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.
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