The Calling to Which We Are Called

(Scriptures:  2 Samuel 18:5-15   Ephesians 4:25-5:2       John 6:35-51)

“I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ²with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

Ephesians 4:1-3

We’re now in mid-August, and for students, the summer break is waning fast.  Lots of merchants are offering back to school sales.  Some churches do a special service for students – which I think I’d like to try here – called the “blessing of the backpacks”.  Of course, many who graduated high school in the spring are going to college, and will be living away from home.  The students look forward to greater independence, but parents worry – will my son or daughter be ok?  Will they know enough to stay out of trouble, to avoid bad influences?  Many parents are giving their son or daughter a talk to remind them: “Remember what we’ve taught you.  Remember who you are.”

“Remember who you are.” Today’s reading from Ephesians can be summed up in those four words – “Remember who you are.”  Over the past several weeks, the Epistle readings have been from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus.  A mixed congregation of Jews and gentiles, Paul wrote them urging unity.  He wrote to praise the congregation for their faithfulness, reminded them of all God has done for them through Jesus Christ, reminded them that, through Christ, the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile had been torn down – and it was high time for the folks at Ephesus to start living that way.  Last week’s reading began with the words, “I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”  In today’s Gospel reading, Paul goes into more detail about what it means to lead such a life, what it means to “remember who you are.”

Paul gets down to cases:  “Let us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.  Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.  Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up.  Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.  Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice.  Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another…..”  These words sound almost impossible, but then Paul reminds us why forgiveness is so important – “forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

"Remember who you are."  Paul’s words give us picture of what it is to live a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called.  A whole sermon series could be preached on each of these injunctions – speak the truth to one another, do not let the sun go down on your anger, labor and work honestly with your own hands, let no evil talk come out of your mouth, and so on – but for today I’ll spare you the sermon series – and you’re welcome.  Instead, I’d like to focus on the importance of remembering who we are, of living lives worthy of our call as Christians, in a world which preaches the exact opposite – and in God’s name.

“Be angry, but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger and do not make room for the devil”  We live in a society which continually seems to grow more divided, more angry, Talk radio and TV commentators stir up resentment, distrust, and hatred, and get paid big bucks to do it.  They laugh at their audience behind their back, all the way to the bank.  Our country’s anger has given the devil lots of space, and the devil has stirred up lots of trouble.  The shooting in Aurora CO, followed by the shooting in a Sikh Temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, didn’t happen in a vacuum – when radio, TV and entirely too many TV and radio preachers are filling the air with hate and mistrust 24/7, it’s inevitable that some number of mentally unstable individuals will lose their precarious grip on reality, and lash out in violence.   Amid the constant drumbeat of resentment, resentment, resentment – it’s essential that we remember that we remember the calling to which we’re called as Christians, the calling to be peacemakers and to love our enemies. It’s essential that we remember who we are.

You don’t have to drive to Colorado or hang out at Sikh houses of worship to see this sort of thing play out.  Plenty of trouble stirring right here in Bridesburg.  Exhibit A, the kerfuffle over the food cupboard sponsored by the Bridesburg Council of Churches.  I know that Bridesburg is a proud neighborhood, a “family first neighborhood” as the banners say, a neighborhood with a strong effort of standing on its own two feet.  The cherished images we have of Bridesburg don’t include visions of hundreds of people waiting in food lines – having food lines winding up and down Kirkbride Street seems like something out of some old newspaper clipping about the Great Depression.  It’s a shock to realize that people here, in Bridesburg, in our neighborhood, right now, are hurting.   There are lots of factors contributing to those food lines.  Some are personal - doubtless in many cases there are stories to be told of marriages and families falling apart under the strain of unemployment, of people numbing themselves with drink or drugs to make the pain go away.  And there are national and international forces at work - the diminished power of organized labor, economic policies that reward corporations for sending jobs overseas, predatory lenders foreclosing on mortgages and throwing people out on the street, 30 years of political efforts to destroy the social safety net, on and on.  But Wall Street bankers and multinational corporations and political leaders at all levels of government seem abstract, faceless, too remote from us even to hear our anger, let alone to be threatened by it.  It’s much easier to blame the victims, to take out our frustration on the folks in the food lines, blaming them for their own problems.  Far easier to call the folks in the food line a bunch of drunks and junkies and scam artists, accusing them of driving long distances to invade our neighborhood, hog our parking spaces, trash our sidewalks, peer in our windows, and drive home with our charitable donations. 

So when our neighbors in Bridesburg start talking like this – and they do, and they will - we need to remember who we are – followers of Jesus Christ, who could have been born into a prominent Roman or Jewish family, but instead was born into a poor family, who could have courted favor with the rich, but instead chose poor and working class persons as his disciples, whose mission it was to preach good news to the poor and liberation to the captive, who told the rich young ruler that before he could follow Jesus he would have to sell all he had and give it to the poor, who, in the words of the Magnificat, “filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”   Yes, many of the folks who come to the cupboard are dysfunctional, drunk, obnoxious.  Yes, it’s inconvenient having them all standing on Kirkbride Street, some of them three sails to the wind by 10 in the morning, with their trash and their loud talk and their old rattletrap cars hogging up all the parking.  But life is inconvenient for them as well.  It’s inconvenient for them to be in poor, inconvenient for them to be unemployed, or perhaps working multiple dead-end jobs that don’t pay a living wage, inconvenient for them to be alcoholic or addicted, inconvenient for them to have children they can’t support, inconvenient for them to have to stand in line for hours and depend on the kindness of strangers, however good natured or well intentioned. The poor in those lines at the cupboard are the poor for whom Christ died.  The poor in those lines at the cupboard are those of whom Christ spoke when he told those at his right hand, whatsoever you have done unto the least of these my brothers and sisters, you’ve done it unto me.  When Jesus fed the five thousand, he didn’t tell the disciples to administer breathalyzer tests or drug screenings or asking the folks to show photo IDs or copies of utility bills to prove they were local and lived in the right zip code.  Christ just fed them – just as God causes rain to fall on the good and the bad, and sends blessing on the just and unjust.  If we are to call ourselves followers of Christ, we can do no less.

Jesus Christ said that the second great commandment, after love of God, was love of neighbor.   The love of which Jesus spoke didn’t necessarily depend on liking our neighbor.  Rather, the love of which Jesus spoke was solidarity, standing by one’s neighbor whether you like your neighbor or not.  Like members of a labor union realizing that an attack on one member is a threat to all. 

The powers and principalities, those who practice spiritual wickedness in high places, specialize in the game of divide and conquer.  They set native-born against immigrant, white against black against Hispanic against Asian, set Christian against Jew against Muslim, set men against women, set straight against gay, set employed against unemployed.  They specialize in pointing out the person here and there who cuts corners to get some extra food stamps or other public assistance – and confabulate all manner of stories about welfare queens.  While they’re pointing over there – “Look at that welfare cheat” - all the while they’re picking our back pockets by passing laws that favor the rich and make life difficult for the rest of us.

Bridesburg has a strong ethic of “sticking together”.  And this is what Jesus calls us to do – stick together – only we need to widen the circle, be willing to stick together with a wider range of people, be willing to practice solidarity with all our neighbors, not just a few.  We need to stick together, to practice solidarity – with the poor when they’re being abused, with the unpopular when they’re being shunned.  We might remember that most of us are ourselves just a few paychecks or pension checks away from going hungry.  We reap what we sow – and the solidarity we practice may be the solidarity that saves us when the chips are down.

“I therefore beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, ²with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, ³making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”    May we at Emanuel Church always lead lives worthy of the calling to which Christ has called us.  May we always remember who we are – and may we always remember whose we are.  Amen.

 

Wonder Bread

(Scriptures:  2 Samuel 11:26 – 12:13a, Ephesians 4:1-16,  John 6:24-35)

What a joy it is to be back with you at Emanuel Church.  I had an amazing time in Cuba – and I’m still mulling over my experiences there in my mind - but, as the saying goes, there’s no place like home.  Rev. Doug, who filled in for me over the past two Sundays, spoke highly of his time with you.  And his words made me even more eager to return.

Last week, Doug preached about the feeding of the five thousand – one of the miracles of Jesus that is recorded in all four Gospels, meaning that the feeding of the five thousand was, for the early church, key to understanding who Jesus is.

And that very question – who is Jesus – is at the center of today’s Gospel reading.  After the crowds were fed and twelve baskets of leftover scraps gathered up, Jesus’ disciples journeyed across the sea back to Capernaum, and in the midst of a gathering storm, Jesus came walking to them on the water.  They landed in Capernaum, and found the same crowds they had just gotten done feeding on the other side of the sea.

And then begins a conversation between Jesus and the crowds, in which the crowds try to get their minds around who Jesus is.  This conversation, which we will hear over the next several Sundays, becomes stranger and stranger as it continues, until at last the crowds become frustrated and stomp off in disgust.  But it begins at a very basic level – the crowds ask Jesus when he had arrived at Capernaum, and Jesus observes that the crowds are looking for him, not because of his signs, but because they had eaten their fill of the loaves – these folk were not well off and were likely used to going hungry, so having a big meal and a full stomach would be a memorable experience – an experience they were eager to repeat.

But Jesus calls on them to go deeper, to trust Jesus, not only to meet their need for bread, but to meet them at their point of deepest need.  “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.”  And they ask how they are supposed to work for this eternal bread, “What must we do to perform the works of God.”  Jesus tells them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”  The people then ask for proof, harking back to their early wilderness tradition: “What sign are you going to give us so that we may see it and believe you?  What work are you performing?  Our ancesters ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”   The people expect that the Messiah will be able to give manna, as it was when Moses led the children of Israel in the wilderness.  Jesus tells them that God, not Moses, gave them the bread from heaven, and God will give them the true bread from heaven.  And the crowds are eager: “Sir, give us this bread always.”  Our reading ends with Jesus’ response:  “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

So Jesus is more or less explicitly comparing himself to the manna with which God fed the children of Israel in the wilderness.  In a place with little food or water, the manna is what stood between the children of Israel and death by starvation.  The manna may not have always been what they wanted – and, indeed, after a while they complained about the blandness and monotony of the manna – but it was what they needed.  The presence of the manna did not take them out of the wilderness – but it made the wilderness bearable, and gave God’s people strength for the journey. 

Psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke of humans as having a hierarchy of needs, which is often represented as a pyramid.  At the base of the pyramid are basic survival needs for food and water.  Just above these basic survival needs are the need for physical and emotional safety.  Higher on the pyramid is the emotional need for love and belonging.  At the top of the pyramid are needs for self-esteem and the desire to reach one’s potential, which Maslow called self-actualization.  Maslow theorized that people whose basic survival and safety needs went lacking, would not feel motivated to seek love, self-esteem, and so forth.  So in a sense, Jesus and the crowds were working from different locations on the pyramid.  The crowds were stuck at the base of the pyramid, in survival mode, focused on their own nutrition and safety – Jesus had fed them, and the crowds wanted Jesus to continue to feed them.  Jesus invited the crowds to rely on Jesus, not just for bread, but for safety, belonging, and all the rest.  The crowds wanted to fill their stomachs; Jesus offered to feed them emotionally, spiritually, in all facets of life.  Jesus spoke of himself as bread – and the crowds were left to wonder what on earth he meant.  He offered himself as a sort of wonder bread, to fill and fulfill them at their many points of need.

Perhaps the image of manna gives us a deeper sense of what Jesus means in asking people to believe in him.  Remember that the manna was provided day by day – they couldn’t store it up for the future, except that they could gather enough on Friday to carry them through the Sabbath.  If they tried to hoard it, it went bad.  So the children of Israel had to trust day by day that God would provide for them.  And perhaps this is the kind of faith we are to have in Jesus – not just reciting the words of a creed, but relying on Jesus day by day to sustain us through whatever life throws at us.

For some in America, it’s been a long time since we’ve experienced physical hunger, or perhaps we’ve never really experienced it.  We know what it is for our stomachs to growl while we’re waiting for dinner, but many have little experience of what it is to go without dinner, and breakfast the next day too, to get by on one meal a day, if that.  But many in America do know – as evidenced by the lines at the food cupboard.  For many children, the school lunch is the only meal they can rely on all day.  For many, especially in urban areas such as our own, while food may be available at low prices, it’s often processed, deep-fried, loaded with corn syrup, carbs, grease, and preservatives – sufficient for filling stomachs, but not good for maintaining health.  In many urban neighborhoods, healthy fruits and vegetables aren’t for sale, or are unaffordable even if they are for sale.  For this reason, many inner city areas have been described as “food deserts.”  And in many countries, many children come into this world with a sentence of “death by starvation” hanging over their heads.  It has been said that, “the question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.”  And many, in Bridesburg and around the world, are waiting to see how our churches will answer.

The crowds who followed Jesus were hungry, in many different ways.  Jesus satisfied their hunger for food, and when he had their attention, offered them the gift of himself.  And that’s a good model for the church to follow.  Starving people can’t eat tracts.  People come to the church with all sorts of needs – for food, for safety, for community, for hope.  Jesus preached the whole Gospel to the whole person – good news for body and soul.  And we in the church are called to do the same.

In Cuba, I saw churches preaching the whole Gospel to the whole person.  Cuba is a country lacking many things – and our country’s embargo on trade with Cuba has only made their situation more precarious – but the people are very resilient and creative.  We were visiting churches affiliated with the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba, among the most progressive protestant groups in Cuba.   And these churches are growing – this group that had started with three churches in the late 1980’s has now, in a little more than 20 years, grown to over 40 congregations, with many of them having been founded in the last 5 or so years.  Often a church will start a small Bible study, and when the Bible study has enough members, it will leave the main congregation to set out and start a new congregation.  And so many of the newer churches are small, with attendance of 20 or 30 or so on a Sunday – indeed, we visited a house church with attendance about the same as Emanuel.  While a few of the older congregations have large buildings, many of the newer churches are meeting in houses; we visited one church that met in a converted garage.  But they’re all feeding their neighbors, physically and spiritually – many have gardens and offer the produce to their neighbors as well as their own members.  One particularly exciting recent development is that some churches have put in water filtration systems – healthy water isn’t always easy to come by in Cuba.  They have outdoor taps so that their neighbors can get clean water, free of charge.  Neighbors line up at these churches with their bottles – many of which have been reused over and over, as plastic bottles are also not always easy to come by - follow the instructions posted on the wall on how to disinfect their bottles with chlorine – also offered at the churches – and then fill their bottles.  The sign on the tap makes an explicit connection between Jesus as living water and the church’s offering of healthy water to their neighbors.

In his teaching and in his actions, most of all in his death and resurrection, Jesus offered the gift of himself.  In a few minutes, we will gather at the table to share bread and wine and to remember Jesus’ self-offering, to show forth Jesus’ death until he comes again.  May we experience Jesus as the bread of life, and when we leave, may we carry Jesus, the bread of life, to our neighbors who are hungry.  Amen.

Breaking Down Walls - A Sermon in Cuba

[Note: Pastor Dave was in Cuba from July 21-28, 2012, as part of a delegation to the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba from the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference, United Church of Christ.  The following sermon was preached in Cuba.]

Ephesians 2:13-22



13But now in Christ Jesus [those] who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. 15He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, 16and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. 17So he came and proclaimed peace to [those] who were far off and peace to those who were near; 18for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, 20built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 21In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; 22in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.

Breaking Down Walls

What a great pleasure it is to be back in Cuba, and to be with the sisters and brothers of the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba. My first trip here was in 2008. I remember walking around the park outside the Capitolio...and being surprised to see a sculpture of the face of Abraham Lincoln. I remember asking our guide what significance this statue of Abraham Lincoln would have had in Cuba, and our guide said something like, “Why not? He was a good guy!” Lincoln was committed to keeping the United States together during a time of many divisions. In the year 1858, just a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, Lincoln addressed the social division in the United States over the institution of slavery using the words of Jesus, as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Our reading from Ephesians deals with houses – or congregations or countries – that are divided, needing reconciliation. St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians praised our Savior who gathers. In Ephesians, Paul was writing to predominantly Gentile, non-Jewish congregations, which apparently felt some alienation from Jewish converts to the way of Jesus. Paul wrote to remind them that both Jewish and non-Jewish followers of Christ were one family, that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the walls dividing Jew and non-Jew were broken down, that though, like all families, they may squabble from time to time, they were nonetheless all one family,

As I was preparing to join with the group of visitors from the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ to the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba, this passages of Scripture, which was read in many of our churches in the United States on Sunday, July 22, seem amazingly appropriate, indeed, almost divinely ordained, for this visit. Some political leaders, particularly in the United States, are really good at building walls, and not so good at breaking them down. Political calculations make it difficult for Cubans to visit the United States. Political calculations make it difficult for citizens of the United States to visit Cuba. “El bloqueo” has imposed tremendous suffering on Cuba. Unfortunately, at the present moment, that’s what the political process has to offer.

From other political leaders in the United States and elsewhere, we hear uplifting messages about globalization – and, indeed, wouldn’t it be wonderful to rid ourselves of the nationalistic barriers that divide us, to think of ourselves as one human race. What a wonderful world that would be. But the global capitalism preached by our political leaders, whose political campaigns are funded by huge corporations, isn’t about global reunification, but, rather, about global exploitation, draining resources from around the globe while being beyond the scope of any one nation’s laws, and therefore accountable to nobody. In this model human beings all around the globe are sheep to be fleeced, or lambs led to slaughter.

But in Christ, it is a different story. Christ has broken down the dividing wall, the hostility cultivated by political leaders. Christ proclaims peace to those who are far off and peace to those who are near – and given the current political divisions, the United States and Cuba are separated by a geographical distance of just 90 miles and by a political gulf so enormous it’s nearly impossible to measure, much less cross. But where political leaders proclaim locked doors and economic leaders find new ways to exploit the needy, God opens a door to a different path, a different way forward. Even our respective governments recognize the unique value of church dialogue. Because we – we in Cuba and we in the United States – are church, under the care of the church we can visit one another in a way that those outside the church cannot. It is only because of Christ that we, Cubans and Americans, can be in this one room together. Where political leaders proclaim fear and suspicion, the Gospel proclaims reconciliation and reunion. We are in different geographical locations, different social settings, different political configurations – but in Christ we are one. The Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba is committed to breaking down the walls of race, gender, class, sexual orientation – and in the United Church of Christ, we share these commitments. And these commitments to breaking down walls have been costly commitments, for the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba and for the United Church of Christ. So in Christ we are united; there is no separation between the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba and the United Church of Christ. Here, in this place, we can see Paul’s words come to life, see Paul’s words put into action. This meeting, our being together in this place, what we experience *today*, is a strong witness to the power of Jesus Christ to gather those who otherwise would be scattered.

Your congregation shows us the way forward. With your ecological gardens and sustainable agriculture, you’re showing that “another world is possible,” proclaiming the countercultural message of the reign of God, which grows like the seed in your gardens, feeding the hungry and bringing hope to the hopeless; proclaiming the gospel of Christ which is living water, like the lifegiving water offered free of charge by many of the Fraternity of Baptists in Cuba congregations. And so Jesus Christ, who has broken down the walls between us, has made a way for us to be with you and to learn from you.

[At this time, the floor was opened for others to share testimonies of how Christ has broken down barriers for them. This was followed by a closing prayer.] Amen.