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In a little while, I will begin to share these Words with
you: “In the night in which our Lord Jesus was betrayed, He took the bread,
blessed and broke it, saying this is my body given, broken for you…” Can you
begin to see the connections this week with the body, the person and the Body
of Christ, the church, being who we are now?
Can you sense the brokenness both Jesus and St. Paul felt over humanity
at one moment… but then prayed and blessed over the people in the joy of God’s
ever lasting love?
Today’s Gospel begins with the horrible realization for
Jesus that His initial messenger, for His Gospel’s turning New Covenant, John
the Baptist, was beheaded by Herod Antipas. Herod was a depraved ruler who couldn’t
deal with having his conscience shamed by John anymore. He didn’t want to keep hearing John calling
him away from his lust for his dead brother’s young teenage daughter, Salome. Did he really silence the voice, though? If that were so, we wouldn’t be here this
morning. What do I mean by that? What perhaps, we may take for granted is that
from the beginning of what we now understand, as Christianity, was built upon a
solid foundation of covenant—promise. God’s promise to be precise. We are descendants, heirs and the adopted
children of promise, and most importantly, through Christ—children of Grace, as
well.
Jesus tried to go off to spend some time in solitude out
in the desert to grieve John the Baptist’s death. The wilderness, as we know, not only would
Jesus be tested within, but as disciples of Jesus, we can understand the need
for going there, as well, at times. The
crowds, as we hear, followed Him, nonetheless and just like the exilic Jews
under Moses shepherding, cried out for “manna.” They were hungry. “The mustard
seed of faith” among Jesus’ disciples doubted that they could serve so many
people yet alone understand Jesus’ unconditional compassion for them to create
the miraculous.
Not understanding Jesus, obviously, still seems to be our
problem today. The sadness, heartbreak
in Paul’s discourse from Romans this week, expresses, how even, right under our
very noses, we have been blessed by God with so many things and in so many ways…
yet many of us have rejected God’s invitation to the lifestyle of Grace—a life
of abundance, “spiritual manna” realized through harboring faith. A huge aspect
of equipping ourselves holistically, as disciples of Jesus is seeking to become
spiritually whole. If we do not address
our spiritual brokenness or weakness; how can we realize God’s covenantal love
overflowing in abundance all around us, over us and in us?!
Coming this Fall, I am greatly looking forward to my
first doctors of ministry class which will be around pastoral care to the
secular world. The secular world, we must realize as Jesus’ disciples, is not
the enemy, but the wilderness frontier we are challenged to share God’s Word,
God’s love within, through our voices, hands and feet. The secular world is, as well, a body
comprised of many “bodies” that all need to be loved and cared for. Here is that universal need that no matter
where you are on life’s journey—God’s invitation, welcome, is always
there. God’s love is everlasting,
enduring the years, centuries and eons of time, we have frittered away battling
God with our willful, unfaithfulness and doubt.
I think we have battled God on so many fronts, at times,
that we are lost in that wilderness, wanting to be led and fed but not really
understanding why and to what purpose. I
thought about this a lot the other day, when I was thinking about the
implementation of spiritual care in secular institutions such as chaplaincy in
hospitals and related “wellness” facilities. What many hospitals ironically do not
truthfully realize, is that people really do need spiritual care just as much as
what medical care they’re there to receive.
Too many hospitals treat the need for speaking with a chaplain as some
sort of formal religious legalism to get this or that, just because. I say that
for the few times I have served in clinical settings of spiritually caring for
others, people’s spiritual wellbeing is lightly addressed, if at all.
Before I came to serve you, I was caring for a man with
terminal stage 4 cancer, through Visiting Angels. Visiting Angels really does
not have a specialization for care givers specifically providing spiritual
care. At the time, the director of the
office I worked at, knew that this person didn’t need regular care-giving but
needed spiritual care, they knew I could provide this man. Essentially the
cancer he had basically metastasized throughout his entire body and by the time
I was serving him, he only had a few months to live. He was basically a non-practicing Jew, who
didn’t even want to hear the word spiritual mentioned in his presence, yet
alone have people care for him. His
family friend, however, knew that’s what he really needed. He really needed the compassionate ear, gift
of presence I could give him, while he spiritually battled his anger and grief
about facing his eventual death.
His grieving and anger was sometimes hard to bear. Beyond
moments of yelling or venting, nearly every conversation began from a dark
light. This man not only had little
faith in the future but it seemed as if he just had no more faith to kindle
about much of anything, anymore. This is
just one story in the day and the life of one person’s desperation. How then,
as disciples of Jesus, when we are spiritually starved and even deny this
reality, get led and fed by the Gospel?
Here’s where we return to that bad spiritual gardening problem, we seem
to justify over and over again, only to sadly define our genuine brokenness and
rebellion against God’s faithfulness towards us.
There is destiny, as an aspect of what life truly
means. It is something however, we must
be truly careful with understanding though.
As mentioned last Sunday, predestination is a theological, slippery
slope of misunderstanding God’s activity and faithfulness towards us, His
children of Grace and promise. We must
look at the notion of destiny as our covenant of faithfulness to be open to
being led and fed by God’s goodness and mercy which is not only steadfast as
the Psalmist speaks of, but enduring, everlasting, forever and ever. That’s probably where you got spiritually
lost again in hearing. We are finite people.
How can we understand forever, if we can’t see or know what forever and
ever actually is? It becomes an abstraction that we can choose to either have
faith in or not.
“O ye of little faith,” is our failure, but doesn’t have
to be our death sentence! Someone I was counseling when I first became a
pastor, battled with a debilitating depression most of her life. In fact, it was so strong that by the time her
family decided to help her go into a nursing home, they helped her to get on
“anti-depressants.” No one really thought about spending time with her while
she was there and perhaps listening to the story of her very hard life…. But I
did. Growing up in a family of 9 siblings, Italian immigrants moving from New
York to Chicago at the turn of the 19th century; She lived a hard
life. She worked nearly 50 hours a week
as a seamstress and as a part-time cook for a pizzeria, while her husband
barely floated from job to job not handling a serious problem he had with
alcoholism. He eventually became physically abusive to her as well and to their
children.
Her battered children, unfortunately, for the most part
abandoned her. She didn’t have or harbor
any relationship with God beyond a misunderstood formality of faith, she was
used to. She had a picture plate of the Pope on the small dresser in her living
room, that when I asked her about it, she would joke about. It took some time to have her trust in me
enough, to be there for her and for her to finally open up and share. She still couldn’t see the bright sky or the
glass half full. She still felt as if
her life was drawing to a close, and she really didn’t care much, anymore about
anything. Here’s where being Italian was
to my advantage, I knew how my own shrinking little Sicilian grandmother thought
or should I say, had an opinion about everything and anything! If she thought you weren’t on the right path,
she’d let you hear about it. I could connect empathetically to this woman by
prayerfully and deeply listening to her through Christ’s love strengthening me
from within.
Compassion is a funny spiritual creature. It is a great, and dare I say, divine gift
from God that you need to have faith enough in yourself to truly implement—share,
love with your neighbor. We are our own
worst enemies at times, in regards, to having faith in ourselves. We can even be destructive towards that
mustard seed of faith trying to grow within us as the New Nature. We can drown it out with the temptations
coming from the wilderness of the world or feed ourselves with the illusion of
self-control by justifying our willfulness over and above God’s providence for
us.
The miracle and spiritual lesson in today’s Gospel
reminds me of a beautiful scene from the 1977 film of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus orders the flustered disciples to
gather the bread and fish scraps while He prays and begins to multiply the
bread and fish. The character playing
Mary Magdalene is in the crowd of thousands, who, at first looks bewildered to
what is taking place, but then she looks towards Jesus then looks down at the
bread in her hands and starts to cry.
Her tears, at that very moment, were her Baptismal confirmation of
seeing God’s love flowing, even, over her.
Perhaps it was her conversion moment of realizing her desperate need to
be led and fed by Christ. Perhaps this
was hers, among many others, moment of being called into discipleship to Jesus.
Wherever, we each individually are, on that long and
winding road towards the Kingdom… We need to keep our hearts open to caring for
our spiritual wholeness by allowing God to reign there. The sovereignty of God’s grace and promise is
all around us. The whole of creation is
His gift to us to live in harmony within and in joyful abundance through merely
responding in Love to Him and our neighbor with the fruit of our renewed lives
through Christ.
Let us Pray,
Gracious and Loving God
Your covenant of steadfast love gives us so much to be
hope-filled, encouraged by
Your Grace and Living Word is our spiritual manna to be
led and fed by for a truly abundant life.
May we be always be grateful for everything You continue
to bless and reign over our lives with.
In Your most precious Name, we lift our prayers to
you—AMEN
August 6th, 2017; Ninth Sunday
after Pentecost; Year A; Proper 13; SOLA Lectionary
Sermon by: Reverend Nicole A.M.
Collins, OSST
Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26; Isaiah
55:1-5; Romans 9:1-13 Matthew 14:13-21
|| RCL: Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21
The link below is to this sermon's delivery at 9:30am at First Congregational Church
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