conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

food, glorious food...a sermon

Last night Trish and I had dinner with some old friends. For me there is little better than dinner with old friends. We went out to a local Indian joint that we all love very much. It was a great time to catch up and check in. Susan is very pregnant. She is due in a matter of days. Julian is hanging in there and being supportive. He clearly takes great joy in his wife. He also just returned from England a month or so ago. He has family there. It is fun to get the family gossip from him. That is a colorful bunch. Why is it that other people's families are colorful when our own may simply be annoying? Ah, that is another sermon.

One of the things I like about Julian is his intense interest in what his friends are doing, how their lives are. So, he asked Trish how her life has been with the new job and the new home and the move. He asked me the same. He also asked me about my sermon. So, if you ever get a chance to meet him, you can either thank him or blame him for mornings like this one.
That's unfair. I rarely work on my sermons on my own. I am always distilling my thoughts through conversations with friends and colleagues, with people at church. This is often how I encounter Christ.
...

When I was in seminary I managed to get a job working for a local catering company. The owner, Pat, proved to be one of the more influential people I met during my time at school.

I had some experience working in kitchens. So, the summer after my first year of school I applied for and got the job working with the seminary's doctoral program. The doctoral students come for one month out of the summer for an intensive series. I did everything from making coffee and putting out snacks to preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner for them. Now, I could not have done this alone. A caterer was hired as well. Pat's company supplied a lot of the nuts and bolts of what we ate. And we ended up working hand in hand all summer. By the time the doctoral students were gone for the year she had asked me to help her in her kitchens.

At the time I thought it was because I was a capable kitchen hand. I mean, I am no great chef. You won't see me on the Food Network with Alton Brown...though I still dream about that...but I am useful. In retrospect, however, I now understand that something else motivated Pat. She knew I was in graduate school and could use the work. And as I began to work for her more frequently, I slowly grew to understand how often that kindness motivated why she hired anyone at all.
There was a motley crew of people like me working for Pat who simply needed the work, needed a hand. There was Sammy who seemed to be working three jobs all the time. Mary Ann was recently married and her husband was out of work. She and Kevin both worked for Pat. Karin was also in graduate school. And the list could go on. There were more people hired because they needed some money to keep themselves afloat than I can count. And you would think that this would lead to chaos and poor catering. It did the exact opposite.

It led to loyalty and mutual feelings of love and affection. It meant that most of us worked our tails off to make sure that the business succeeded. After a time, Pat could simply leave us with the menues for six parties. She would simply arrive at the kitchen at a certain time and we would have them ready for her to deliver.

There was always enough work.
She never turned me down when I needed the money.
She never turned me away when I needed the help.
She never sent me home without a little extra tip in my pocket, food in a container and a bottle of wine for my wife.
There was always extra.
There was always more.

During times of unemployment, breaks in school and summer field ed she was always there with hours to work and food to prepare. She was a good caterer and a good boss because she worked under the assumption of generosity. There will always be more than enough work and food to go around. There was always enough love and trust.

John's Gospel this morning is yet one more installment in a series...and there are two more weeks beyond this one. What we have been listening to over the last few weeks (and will continue to study) is a sermon that Jesus gave after feeding the five thousand on the hillside. Thus, it makes some sense then to talk about dinners with friends and working for a caterer. We have spoken over the last couple of weeks about miracles and meaning-making and how the context for our lives and all of the events great and small are within the Gospel itself and not the other way around. And today we again see God's generosity.

God's generosity is to be praised. God's acts of generosity to the world are found in the person of Jesus, the Bread of Life. If there is generosity to be had it is through relationship with Jesus, who is God.
Phil Streeter, an English author and poet calls the feeding of the five thousand to be "Sheer extravagance."

"Sheer extravagance!" It is indeed. There are no words, not really, to describe what John is trying to describe to us. Jesus is more than a nice guy. He is more than a prophet. He is more than the son of Mary and Joseph. Like the people in the Gospel story this morning, we can get hung up in those debates ourselves. But no, Jesus is the Son of God. He is the Bread of Life.

Eating with Christ, feeding on him, overcomes all division.
Eating with Christ, feeding on him is an introduction to God.
Eating with Christ, feeding on him, brings about the end of Death.
This is the context of the Church. This is the backbone of the faith.

Thus, in Ephesians Paul is not simply stating some good ideas around communal responsibility and anger management, though he is. These ideas have a context, a context and an understanding of the nature of a community...perhaps the individual community that was in Ephesus and the nature of the community that is the Church. There are assumed virtues filling in the blanks, the spaces where explanation is needed. Paul's letters don't ever really deliver a systematic theology as much as they illuminate the nature of community. They are letters. They are relational. Paul may be praying for friendship...and writing as if to write to friends he has not seen in months or years.

Paul understands that the church is the Body of Christ. The Church is, once again, that person standing on the hillside having fed the multitudes, the miracle worker. Paul also understands that it is much more complicated than that. We, the church, are both the recipients of the heavenly Bread of Christ and the agents of it. We are the Bread of Heaven because we have received the same grace.

Paul knows this. It is what he knows of God that gives him the will to claim people he has not yet met as brothers and sisters, to challenge them and to admire them.

And this is why we work out our anger in the ways he suggests. We are all of the one Body.
We do not steal because there is really nothing else we need.
We don't hold grudges.
We don't live in bitterness.

Why? Because we have already received grace. We have more than enough. We simply need to give to the world the Love of God which we received through Christ.

This is how I began to understand my time with Pat. Pat closed down her business about a week before you all called me here for the candidating weekend. We all gathered at her place. It was great to be surrounded by these people. The food was fabulous. Pat had me help her in the kitchen. There was beer and wine...and some swanky gormet soda "for the Baptist pastor. We don't want him feeling left out!"
The assumptions that Pat worked under are Gospel assumptions. There is always enough. Scarcity is a lie. Give and you shall receive. And we always have plenty to give.

Last night at dinner, Julian asked me if my sermon was ready. I laughed. Sadly, they are rarely ready on Saturday night. I may mull over them all week, reading and researching, but I tend to get up early on Sunday morning to get it all together. But it was a joy to me that he asked. His willingness to work this stuff through with me is one of the things I treasure about my relationship with him.

I am always amazed when I get together with good friends after some time. You may recognize the phenomenon yourself. You know how it goes. You have not spoken in months. There is that initial joy and awkwardness of getting back on track. Perhaps you wonder if you will still enjoy their company and they yours. But then things slowly come back together. And in a a few moments you are back where you were the last time you saw them. The intervening time is overcome by something...something intangible. You simply know one another well enough to fill in all the blanks. The power of the relationship still carries. It is a joyful and generous thing. You know one anothers foibles and failures, successes and virtues. And this intimacy seems to overcome almost any length of time.

I see this reality in my life as a sign of what Paul and John are trying to express. I see that intimacy as the generosity of Christ, as a manifestation of Heavenly Bread. I see last night's dinner as a continuation of the meal on the hillside. In the mystery of coming back together, of renegotiating our friendship, I find the Bread of Heaven.

So, there we sat, the four of us working on my sermon, processing through ideas and thoughts...
...perhaps enjoying a little Bread with our dinner.

Amen.

Posted by tripp at August 13, 2006 06:31 AM