Dylan's sermons

"Three Miracles at Jesus' Spontaneous Dinner Party": Proper 13, Year A

Memorial Episcopal Church, Baltimore, Maryland
July 31, 2005
Nehemiah 9:16-20 - link to NRSV text
Psalm 78:1-29 - link to BCP text
Romans 8:35-39 - link to NRSV text
Matthew 14:13-21 - link to NRSV text

Have you ever wondered why it is that, when we gather as the church to remember Jesus, we do it with a meal? If you think about it, it could have been anything. We could have built statues to remember Jesus, or held a dance. We could have made it a poetry reading, a teach-in, a weekly golf tournament -- but we didn't. When we gather as the church, our central act together in remembrance of Jesus is to have a meal -- the Eucharistic meal.

I know, it doesn't seem like much, as meals go. I have a friend who likes to say that when he receives one of those communion wafers, he finds it easier to believe that it's really Jesus' body than to believe it's really bread. But this is supposed to be a meal -- a feast, even. An abundant and lavish one, held in remembrance of someone -- Jesus of Nazareth -- who had a reputation for being, as the Irish scholar John Dominic Crossan puts it, "a party animal." We have a feast to remember Jesus, complete with breaking out the wine (which really ought to be our best stuff) before noon on a Sunday, because Jesus was remembered, as Matthew 11:19 puts it, as "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners."

This is not the Jesus a lot of us grew up with, whose hair may have been a little long for our parents' taste, but whose name came up mostly when our parents wanted us to behave, hang out with the right kind of people, behave like the good citizens they may have (rather naively) thought we were. But today’s gospel doesn’t fit in with the picture of the well-mannered Jesus of popular conception anywhere near as well as it does with the “party animal” Crossan describes, and that’s the point I want to start with today.

I know that this isn't what usually comes to mind first when we think about the feeding of the five thousand. Usually, when people think about this story, they think about the miracle, by which they mean the multiplication of the loaves. Admittedly, that part of the story is pretty impressive. Not only did God's power produce enough food to feed five thousand people -- not counting the women and children, as Matthew emphatically points out (Matthew 14:21) -- but there were twelve baskets of leftovers. Twelve baskets, like twelve tribes of Israel -- in effect, this story tells us that there was such plenty represented in this feast that there were enough leftovers to fill doggie bags for all of God's people. Truly impressive stuff!

But as far as I’m concerned, that miracle of mutiplying loaves pales in comparison to a couple of other miracles in this story that I think are even more impressive, even more miraculous demonstrations of God's power acting in Jesus' ministry.

To set the scene for those miracles, it's important to know that in Jesus' culture, people really took seriously the old maxim that "you are what you eat," and not from a nutritional viewpoint. I'm talking about purity, about keeping kosher. You are what you eat; if you want to be a kosher kind of guy, the right kind of person, you've got to eat the right kind of food. This might initially sound like a fairly simple matter: if it's pork for dinner, you just keep passing the plate. But if you've ever had a serious food allergy -- or if you've ever had a guest who did -- you know just how complicated things can get. Who knew that peanut oil was in some brands of ice cream? Think how complicated it is to try to avoid not just one ingredient, but anything not prepared in the right way.

If it's really important to you, there are only two ways to be sure that what you're getting is kosher. One is to be in the kitchen, not only hovering over everything on the ingredient list, but making sure beforehand that no surface has been contaminated. The other is dicier: if you know your host family very, very well, and if you know for SURE that they know how to keep their kitchen and what you can and can't eat, you just might be able to trust them to prepare a meal you can safely eat.

So there it is: keep a close eye on every ingredient and how it's prepared, or at the very least make absolutely sure that you don't eat with anyone unless she knows how to prepare it all AND she really understands how important it is to do it right, and you just might be able to share a meal.

And then think of this with respect to the story in this Sunday's gospel:

NOBODY KNEW WHERE THE FOOD CAME FROM.

Imagine those five thousand people at Jesus' spontaneous dinner party whispering: does anyone know who baked the bread? What kind of fish was this? Was it cleaned? This was some kid's lunch??! Does anyone know who his mother is? That would say something about whether the food is OK ...

But that didn't happen. Instead, five thousand people take one guy's word for it -- not a family member, not their best friend, not even someone they knew well -- and they sit down to eat food when -- and I mean this literally -- God only knows where it came from. Jesus inspired a miraculous trust in those who came to him, the trust that made everyone there willing to forget about years of "you are what you eat" conditioning to accept bread from Jesus without knowing or asking about where it came from and whether it was safe or kosher. Five thousand people -- not counting the women and children -- found their lives so transformed in encountering Jesus that all of their fears of dangers to be avoided, of what it would mean if they joined the ranks of those seen as impure, gave way to enthusiasm for sharing the feast before them.

Think about the kind of trust Jesus must have engendered in people to get that kind of response. That's real, life-changing spiritual power in Jesus' presence, a miracle at least as impressive as the multiplying loaves.

But that isn't the end of it. There's one more miracle in this story, and I think it's the most impressive one of all. In Jesus' culture, it wasn't just "you are what you eat"; it was also "you are who you eat with." Some of that was just a logical extension of purity observance, because it wasn’t just the ingredients that could make the food -- and you -- impure; it was also the hands passing the food. Imagine the scene of that spontaneous dinner party in this Sunday's gospel, and imagine that you'd just experienced that second miracle of being able to trust Jesus to provide you with food that's good. But Jesus isn't the peanut vendor at the ballpark; he’s not hurling individual portions with miraculous accuracy directly to you. Strangers brought the bread to Jesus, who blessed and broke it ... and handed the pieces to the disciples, who handed them to others in the crowd, who handed them to others, and so on across countless pairs of hands before it got to you. Take that bread, and you're taking into yourself not just whatever was in the field where the wheat was grown and in the kitchen when it was baked, but also what was on the hands of every other person in that crowd.

That's reason enough to be skittish about who you eat with, but that's not all. There's also the business of honor, crucial in Jesus' culture. A man’s willingness to do business with you, to consider allowing a daughter to marry your son, to acknowledge you as a person worth acknowledging, depended on how honorable he saw you as being. And "you are who you eat with" was the operative rule that said that your character would be assumed to be the same as the character of your companions at dinner. Eat impure food, and you're impure. Eat with a rebellious son or a tax collector and you're not going to be seen as being any more honorable than they are.

But along that hillside, over five thousand people were willing to receive not only Jesus and the bread that he blessed, but also the strangers with whom they shared it. Every one of them became, on that dusty hillside, one with every other. This was a completely spontaneous dinner, so there was no checking the guest list or asking for credentials. Distinctions between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, priest and tax collector -- indeed, all the distinctions around which wars were fought between nations, families, and brothers -- just didn't count any more.

And I'm not just saying that in the naive way that lets college-educated white people say “oh, I don’t pay any attention to the color of a person’s skin.” The privilege that comes with my skin color means that I’m not going to be pulled over because of it, that I’m unlikely to be shot because of it, that I’m more likely to get fair treatment in court because of it, and so I can afford to pretend that I don’t notice color. That’s NOT what I’m talking about when say that in Jesus has the power to make irrelevant all the categories we use to divide. What I'm talking about is that radical force that turns mountains and valleys to plains, bringing down the mighty and raising the lowly. What I’m talking about is the end of a world in which some people aren’t counted as a world dawns in which EVERYONE counts. I'm talking about real change, a world in which a child from any neighborhood in Baltimore has the same chance at education, self-esteem, and all of the privileges that a child from the suburbs takes for granted. I'm talking about a world in which a child from any village in the Sudan has access to the running water and lights to read by at night that is taken for granted by children from across Baltimore.

When I talk about that third miracle from Jesus' lakeside feast, I’m talking about the miracle that fires us up to give flesh to that vision of a world in which every child has a chance -- in which God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus taught us not only that this is possible, but that he was sending the Holy Spirit to give us what we need to make it happen. Every meal he shared with his disciples, with sinners and Pharisees, or five thousand strangers, was a living parable of that possibility, of that vocation that is his gift to us.

Thanks be to God!

"Fear Not, O Soil" - May 16, 2004

Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C
Joel 2:21-27; Psalm 67; John 14:23-29

As you may remember, last week we had some excellent guest preachers, who chose as their subject Jesus' command to "love one another as I have loved you." What impressed me most about their sermon is how open they were in talking about the barriers and struggles they (and we) encounter trying to live into that command.

They're a tough act to follow, so I want to build on the important things -- the crucial things, the foundational things -- they said to us last week. Those things were crucial and foundational for those of us who want to follow Jesus because when Jesus says, "those who love me will keep my word," there’s a good chance that the word he is referring to specifically is the "new commandment" from last week's sermon, the commandment from John 13:34 to love others as Christ loves us. Last week's gospel told us that our love proclaims whose disciples we are; this week's gospel builds on that by saying that our love for others is how we experience God's love for us, and how we make where we live into God's house, God's home, the place where God's Spirit lives on earth.

Some of you have heard me talk about the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus was growing up, that was the place he was told was God's house, God's home, and he was told what made it possible for God's Spirit, God's holiness to be present there to an extent not possible any place else. Such a holy place had to be carefully guarded and protected. The conventional wisdom is that pure things are pure because they haven't come into contact with anything dirty. As soon as something dirty -- even something little -- penetrates into something that's clean, the dirtiness has spread, and the whole thing is dirty. For example, let's say I'm baking a cake for a special dinner. I've made the batter, and I pour it into the pan. Then I remember that I need to scoop out the catbox before the guests arrive, so I make my way to the bathroom where the catbox is, set down the cake pan next to the box, and start scooping the catbox. Just a little tiny piece of what I'm scooping from the catbox falls into the cake pan. Can I go ahead and bake the cake, and tell my guests that there's only one chunk from the catbox in the cake, so if they get the slice of cake with the cat-generated surprise in it, they can just pick it out, or let me know and they'll get a new slice? I don't think so; the minute the tiniest chunk from the catbox gets in the cake, the whole cake has to be thrown out. That's why not very many people would have the cake pan anywhere near the catbox. Pure things have to stay well away from dirty things to stay pure. If your hands are clean, you can't touch something dirty, or your hands will be dirty. So God's people guarded the purity of the Holy of Holies very carefully, because if the wrong sort of person, a dirty person, got in, the place wouldn't be clean. And God's house has to be clean, right? Conventional wisdom is that God's holiness, God's purity, means that God can't live in a place where impurity or sin dwells. Conventional religious wisdom in many quarters still says that if we take seriously that this is God’s house, if this is a place where God is to be at home, we must be very careful here to keep everything in its place – if we can’t keep the dirt outside where it belongs, at least we should make sure everyone knows just how dirty we think it is.

That’s conventional wisdom. But you know what's coming, don't you? How much does Jesus teach conventional wisdom? St. Paul puts it well: Christ's wisdom is foolishness to the world. The world says that you make a place clean by separating out the dirt, by keeping dirt in its place, in the flower beds outside. And I think some of our anxiety about dirt and what to do with it springs from our knowledge that we are dirt. We see others as dirty because they remind us of something in ourselves that we don't want to face. We have to make our boundaries between us and them, pure and impure, clear because we don't want others to think we're like those people, the ones who do those awful things. Those people are dirt; our hands are clean.

But God formed each and every one of us from the dirt; we are dust, and to dust we shall return. Each and every one of us –rich and poor, gay and heterosexual, black and brown and white, torturers and tortured, the virtuous and the wicked – all six of the people worldwide who might actually fall into either of those categories – and the vast teeming billions of us who are not virtuous or wicked, but neither and both of them at once – each and every one of us was formed of the same dirt. The same rain falls on each of us, and the same sun shines above us in the same sky. The same God blesses us with that sun and rain.

If the pew Bibles I’ve ordered were here, I’d ask you to open them right now to the end of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, so we could take a look at the demand Jesus makes there of those of us who presume to call ourselves Jesus’ followers. It’s one that sounds impossible: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Perfect? Doesn’t God know that we’re creatures of earth, that we’re dirt? But here’s how Jesus defines being perfect like God is perfect: it’s loving like God loves. Specifically, it’s about being every bit as indiscriminate as God is, in sending the same rain, the same sun, the same love and the same blessing on each and every one of us – and lest we start thinking that means, “each and every one of us good people,” Jesus specifically says, in Matthew 5:45, “on the righteous and the unrighteous.” If you want a “biblical morality,” that’s it.

But surely God doesn’t expect us not to discriminate between bad people, dirty people, and good people – people like us? God doesn’t, but if that’s not enough to tell us that such indiscriminate love and blessing is God’s will, then maybe we should take a moment to remember that in the biblical story, in our story as God’s people, we are not only all formed of the same dirt, but as humans we are all given life by the same Spirit, by God’s spirit breathed into the dust we are. That’s what Genesis tells us.

God's Spirit does not dwell in spotless temples of white marble, but in earthen vessels. The temple where God's Spirit dwells, the place where Christ and God the Father make their home on earth, is in the dirt. It's the Body of Christ. We don't need to get rid of the dirt to make Christ's home, to be Christ's Body, to build the temple; we need to love the dirt. Get rid of the dirt, and we’re not cleaning house; we’re driving God’s temple out of our church – the church we call ours when we forget that it’s God’s. The church we call ours when we forget that it is Christ’s Body, where our Baptismal Covenant obligates us to seek and serve Christ in all others.

This is in no way saying that we should take God's presence among us lightly, or that we can experience the fullness God wants for us without hard work done intentionally over a lifetime. But it's not the sort of work we might think. It's not trying to get rid of what's dirty, or trying to be different from those dirty people out there. It's the work of seeking out those we're tempted to think of as dirt, whoever that is, and loving them as Christ loves us. If we want to experience God's purity, we need to go out and make some mud pies. Because as we learn to love those who stretch our ability to love, we see the face of God. As we learn to love dirty people, we can recognize that we too are people of earth, of dirt, and we experience what we can't understand with worldly wisdom: God's holiness, God's purity does not flee from dirt, but requires it, as God's purity is pure love and forgiveness.

So Jesus’ word to us in today’s gospel is “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Don’t be afraid of getting dirty, of experiencing our shared human identity as creatures of earth. Or as our Old Testament reading says, "do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice!" Don’t worry about what will happen when we bestow our blessing as freely as God blesses us with sun and rain and the breath of life, of God’s Spirit. Open the doors of God's house WIDE. If we’re going to call this God’s house, we should invite every creature of earth to come in and join the feast. Don't fret about whether they'll track in the dirt from outside. And don't look for ways – especially not on the Lord’s Day – to make people ashamed of dirt. That’s not the Word Jesus asks us to keep. We are called as God’s people to proclaim God's word that God is in the midst of God's earthy people, and God's people shall never be put to shame.

Thanks be to God!