Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
2 Sam 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; Ps 130; Eph 4:25–5:2; Jn 6:35, 41-51
I spent most of the 1990s living unhappily in Los Angeles, slogging away at a dissertation. LA is a city known for its nightlife, but I’m a morning person, so what used to fascinate me was a ritual that took place in the early mornings. There was a block of Sunset Boulevard which was dominated by huge gay dance clubs. In the evenings, it popped with life, but if you happened to drive by on a Sunday morning, you’d see a much more peaceful scene: groups of men sitting at café tables, enjoying coffee and breakfast, often with a book open on the table. It took me a long time to realize that those books were Bibles. Those men were Christians, or, at least, they felt drawn to Jesus, and yet they had been made so unwelcome in the churches that they were studying the Scriptures and having coffee with Jesus on their own. As someone who was also drawn to Jesus, but for whom the behavior of Christians had become an insurmountable deterrent, I felt a kind of kinship: the club of people who loved Jesus but had not been loved by the church.
They are not the only ones. This is Pride week at the Cathedral, which began with our annual pride service last Sunday and will continue today as a delegation from our our congregation represents us in the Défilé de fierté (the Pride March). This week, we celebrate the truth that God’s love knows no bounds, that God made and loves every human being, that none of us is beyond the reach of grace and that none of us are so good that we have no need of it. We remember that Jesus came, not to judge, but to open the doors of mercy to all who had been condemned as inadequate, unholy, broken, or Other. Proclaiming that truth is an act of great love; living that truth is the road to holiness — and yet, too often, the church has made our doors too narrow for many to enter. And for those who have been treated with contempt or excluded, simply being nice now is not enough. To live God’s grace — really to live it — we need to ask and embody a different question: How do we get beyond broken? How do we move from the territory of our pain to the place of our belonging?
It’s the central question of the psalmist today, calling to God out of the depths from the barren ground in which the only action possible is waiting: “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope. My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.” And it’s the question at the center of Raynor Winn’s beautiful autobiography, The Salt Path, in which the author tells her own story of death and rebirth. At the start of the book, she and her husband lose the farm which was their home and livelihood, the place where they had raised their family for almost thirty years. Staring at the eviction notice, realizing they had no money and no way to earn any and no place to go, they thought they had hit bottom, until, amid the final flurry of packing, the husband received a terminal diagnosis. That was bottom. With no way forward, they made a way, found just enough money to buy a tent and some backpacks, and set off to hike England’s South West Coast Path — all 630 miles of it. After all, sleeping on the streets was homelessness, but sleeping in a tent on a path could pass for normal. Almost as if they had someplace to belong.
Step by step, tired, hungry, cold, but buoyed by the beauty around them, they slowly came to life again. They walked the salt path — the path of tears — and found it the path of rebirth. In Christian teaching, that salt path is called “grace.” It is the strength that comes when our own strength is exhausted, the hope that allows us to breathe even when every earthly hope is gone, the crumbs which feed us — we know not how — until we are strong enough to face again the world.
There was a time in the life of the prophet Elijah when he had to flee the wrath of a queen. Alone in the desert, hunted like prey, he lay down under a tree and prayed that he might die. But an angel of the Lord came to him and said, “Get up and eat.” He ate the bread the angel provided, and slept again; then the angel came again and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” And in the power of that tender gift, Elijah walked forty days to the mount where he would see God. (I Kings 19:5-7)
What do you make of that? Can you think of times a friend or a stranger has fed you that food, the food of sustaining kindness which allows you to journey on? We in church talk a lot about manna, the bread which fell from heaven, but in our daily lives, manna looks like ordinary acts of kindness. Not a miracle, but the person who brings you food when you are sick, sends you a few dollars when you’re a student, tends your children when you are at the end of your tether, cleans your home because they know you are caring for someone else and don’t have time to do it yourself. I can name pretty much every time someone has shown me that type of kindness; I bet you can, too.
That kindness is the keynote of the church described in Ephesians, when St. Paul says, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us.” (Eph 4:31-32) You see, the transformation of our lives comes about by grace, but its fruit is joy — joy which makes our lives a sign to those around us that, whatever our struggles, there is still goodness in this world, goodness in the hearts of people, light that leads us on and draws us in.
In 1989, while those guys were studying their Bibles on Sunset Boulevard, members of the church I would later join were working with a new start-up, Project Angel Food, to prepare and bring meals to people dying of AIDS. Often, these men were alone; their own families would not take them in, but this group of strangers was determined to be a force for love in their world. Because their patients could not come to church, the volunteers brought church to them: not doctrine and lessons, but the living bread of love given to those who had believed they were beyond love’s gaze.
That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me shall not thirst.” (John 6:35) He meant that he was bread and sign for all the messed up, confused, sometimes-lost people in this world. The ones who know we are not perfect. The ones who struggle to be what we feel we are. The ones who have been told we are not welcome.
Perhaps that’s why his hearers respond in such a strange way. Instead of saying, “He’s crazy,” or asking questions, they start reciting his genealogy — essentially, proclaiming their belonging. They are the good, the holy, the true, the people who have known Jesus since he was small — not the people so hungry for hope that they are willing to eat bread of life.
The bread of life is small and dry and improbable. It evokes our need, not our sufficiency. It asks us to open our heart, not to rest in some pretense of enoughness. It comes to us from a fugitive people fleeing bondage through a body broken on a cross; nothing about it is safe or sane or predictable. It is the wild energy of God coursing through our bodies; the hunger for God prompting us to enter the doors of a cathedral, maybe for the first time; the sip of wine shared with strangers which turns them into friends.
And we are its true home. We are the vessels, broken and healing. Not all at once, but gently, coaxed by a thousand small acts of love. Like shy animals peering out of their dens, we emerge, once more, into the light. To find that it was always there, and always for us. For us — on our side — in the deepest way imaginable. Until we can say, with the poet Seamus Heaney:
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk
And the half-true rhyme is love. (“The Cure at Troy”)