The Choice...

My thanks this week to the writing of the Rev. Dr. Delmer L. Chilton, Lindy Black, and Charlene Fairchild, among (I am sure) others.

I have to say that I am going to miss the "bread" passages. As I have written each week, I've been challenged to try and find a fresh perspective. I don't know whether I succeeded in those efforts, but the journey has been enlightening.

John 6:56-69

"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever." He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, "This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?" But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, "Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But among you there are some who do not believe." For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. And he said, "For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father."

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God." 

This is the Word of the Lord.

I don’t know how they ended up in the synagogue from the lakeshore, but there they were, shocked, puzzled faces turned toward Jesus as he invited them to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood and to live in him.

The noise in the little synagogue was deafening. Not only did you have the folks who had eaten of the leaves and fishes the day before, now enraged that Jesus was claiming to be greater than Moses, incensed that Jesus claimed to have come from and be returning to heaven, apoplectic over Jesus calling God his Father… you had the rank-and file disciples, dozens of them, perhaps more, who had been following Jesus for months – perhaps years – now throwing up their hands in disgust and frustration.

“Dude, I mean, Rabbi, I just don’t get what you’re saying. I mean I hear the words, and I know what each individual word means, but when you put them together they make no sense!”

But the fact is that there is nothing more to say. Jesus has laid it all out for them, if they will listen: “I am the bread of life… I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world…”

So all Jesus said in response was, “Fellas, if you’re scandalized by this, you are gonna have a real hard time with what’s coming up.”

It’s funny. The people who went and found Jesus so they could see another miracle, get another meal? You’d expect them to leave; in fact, I’d be surprised if any of them had stayed around this long.

The ones our reading refers to as “disciples,” though… maybe they weren’t in the boat when Jesus calmed the storm, maybe they hadn’t seen him walk on water, or turn the water into wine at Cana, but they had seen lepers healed, they’d seen strength return to withered limbs and sight restored to blinded eyes, they had heard Jesus speaking the very words of the living God!

Why would they leave?

I guess up until now it had been fun. Maybe they had nothing better to do… maybe they just followed Jesus around on their off days, I don’t know. What I do know is that now they are faced with a choice: understand that Jesus Christ, in fulfilling the Law of Moses, is in fact calling them beyond that Law, beyond a system of rules and regulations and into a relationship with the Living God.

There’s no doubt that this is the hard choice, the dangerous choice, the scandalous choice. It involves moving beyond everything they have ever known, and everything the society they are surrounded by expects from them, and moving into the now-and-coming Kingdom of God, embracing a sacrifice on their behalf which hasn’t even happened yet.

But it’s that, or…

Go back to the familiar, the safe, the popular, the accepted.

And though they had seen the miracles, had eaten the bread and fishes, had heard the words of God… one by one, or in groups of three or four, these disciples chose…

And soon, all too soon, the synagogue – not a very large room to begin with – felt cavernous in its emptiness. A sandal scuffed the gritty stone floor, and it echoed. Jesus turned to those who remained. Where there had been dozens, perhaps a hundred or more… there were twelve. Some of them looked at the open door. Others looked at the floor, or off into space.

“How about you?” Jesus asked, softly. “Do you want to go, too?”

In my imagination, the question actually confused Peter, because (do you notice?) he never says “yes” or “no.” For him, and for the others, the question is moot.

Oh, no doubt they are sickened by the graphic words Jesus has used… the idea of gnawing on his flesh, like an animal tearing at the carcass of a fresh kill, is a difficult image for anyone to take.

But these men know things that they can no longer pretend to be ignorant of. Maybe the others, those now walking back down the dusty road to their villages and homes and comfortable old lives, can rationalize it and explain it all away, maybe they can ignore it, but these twelve cannot.

Jesus is asking them to make that same hard choice. Like Joshua standing before the newly-formed nation of Israel, and challenging them to “…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve…” the choice facing these remaining disciples is between the comfort and tradition of the life they had always known, and going against all of that, going against their vary culture, becoming social and religious outcasts, all based on the word of a man who claimed to be from God… who demanded they gnaw on his flesh, and slake their thirst with his life’s blood.

But for these disciples, this is not some blind choice, like picking a door on “The Price is Right.” It’s funny: they had seen and heard and experienced exactly the same things as those who had walked away. They’d seen a dead child live again, seen demons forcibly evicted from the bodies they possessed, watched five small barley loaves somehow keep feeding and feeding and feeding until thousands of people could eat no more…

Somehow, though, for these disciples, when Jesus spoke about being the bread that came down from heaven, it all clicked. Not that they had perfect comprehension, mind you – there would be many times to come where they would falter and miss the point – but in this moment, when Jesus asked the question, for them it came down to a matter of putting their future into the hands of the One who had been there for them in the past. And for them, the choice was already made.

Peter spoke for all of them when he spread his hands and said, “But where would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe… no, we know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

The choice was made.

For far too many people, believing in God is like believing in UFOs or believing in the Loch Ness Monster – they acknowledge the probability that God exists, and that’s about it. Nothing really changes for them because nothing needs to change.

The easiest, most comfortable place to be is where the majority of the people that day in the synagogue at Capernaum were: straddling the fence between commitment and rejection, relying on Jesus just so far as the fulfillment of their perceived needs go, but unwilling to lay aside those “needs,” take up their cross, and follow Jesus.

But God calls us to get off the fence – pushes us off if necessary, like Jesus did that day on the lakeshore and in the synagogue with his hard words. For the Twelve, just like for you and for me, the decision to go all in, to place our lives and eternities into the hands of the One who gave us life in the first place, is one that we make anew every day.

In many ways, on some days the Twelve weren’t all that much different from those who turned away from Jesus. The Twelve made mistakes, lost faith, missed the point, and when things got really dangerous that night in the Garden of Gethsemane, they scattered.

But when Jesus rose from the dead, they saw him alive. And when the wind of the Holy Spirit blew on the day of Pentecost, they were there, the tongues of fire rested on their heads. Perhaps the difference between the disciples who stayed and the ones who left began when they chose their path that day in the synagogue.

Harry Emerson Fosdick put it like this: “He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.”

May we be like the Twelve, who though they didn’t understand it, didn’t know where it was going, and had a lot of ideas and expectations that were almost exactly wrong, chose the pathway of eternal life, looked to Jesus, and said, “Who else could we go to? You have the words of eternal life.”

Heretical Orthodoxy...

Thanks to Mark Suriano and Kathryn Matthews Huey for their insights on today's readings. The term "heretical orthodoxy" is from Peter Rollin's "How to (Not) Speak of God."

Isaiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Romans 8:12-17

So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh — for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ — if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

John 3:1-17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

In his book on the emergent church, How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins talks about something he calls “Heretical Orthodoxy.” The idea is that, rather than having, as Christians, to choose between an orthodoxy of absolutism (where we know everything about God, we have all the answers locked safely in our creeds and doctrines and theologies) or an orthodoxy of relativism (where we pick and chose our creeds and doctrines and theological beliefs like we choose our favorite soft drink, and it’s OK if you like Coke while I like Pepsi), there is a third way.

“Orthodoxy” is defined as “right belief”… but Rollins’ “Heretical Orthodoxy” asks: What if the Christian faith is not about right belief, but about believing in the right way? What new things could we learn about God, about one another, about ourselves, and about the ways in which the Triune God is alive and active in the world today?

In our Gospel reading, we meet Nicodemus, a man whose entire life revolved around careful, stringent orthodoxy.

The Pharisees were a sect of Judaism dedicated to carefully following every letter of the Law of Moses without deviation which, in their view, was the proper method to honor God. This translated into hundreds of laws governing every facet of life, from how far one could walk and how many things one could carry on the Sabbath to which races and nationalities one could associate with. All of this was in an effort to have lived a life acceptable to God on the day of resurrection.

The Pharisees’ polar opposite were the Sadducees, the elite and powerful group who emphasized the sacrifices and rituals of Temple worship above all. They associated with the Roman governors, adopted ever more of the food, dress, and habits of Greek culture, and did not at all believe in the resurrection. Where the Pharisees would be called absolutists, the Sadducees were the fist-century equivalent of relativists.

What these groups held in common was the fact that they had succeeded, at least in their own minds, in successfully defining God: What God expected, what God enjoyed, what God hated, who God hated, and how God reacted to specific external stimuli: do this here, and that happens over there. You get the idea.

The problem is that, in the words of Harry Emerson Fosdick, “God defined is God finished.” Once we are convinced that we know exactly what to do and say and think to get the desired result from the Divine, we in effect replace the Divine with the self.

So when our Gospel introduces Nicodemus as one who comes to Jesus by night… it isn’t just talking about the time of day when the sun is down. Nicodemus lives in the darkness of cold, idolatrous certainty, of an orthodoxy that has become an object of worship unto itself.

We aren’t told why Nicodemus came to see Jesus. In John’s chronology, this is not long after Jesus cleared the Temple, overturning the moneychangers’ tables and driving them out with a homemade whip. Perhaps this was actually something that the Pharisees appreciated, since they were constantly at odds with the elite leadership of the Temple, the Pharisees. That and the signs we are told that Jesus performed while in Jerusalem may have compelled Nicodemus to visit Jesus and invite him to join with the Pharisees. Certainly, Nicodemus’ opening words, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God,” sounds like an official pronouncement of approval.

At the same time, Jesus’ words and actions may have had an opposite effect on Nicodemus. Perhaps this Pharisee had been having misgivings about the effectiveness of his faith journey. He saw how the Pharisees neglected God-created humanity in favor of cold conformity to religious expectations. He saw that, rather than God blessing the faithfulness of the Pharisee sect with a restoration of God’s favor to Israel, the boot of Roman oppression ground harder down on the necks of the oppressed Jews with each passing day. He felt the darkness of idolatry, the worship of rules and regulations, freezing his innermost being, his very soul, to death. In this light, Nicodemus’ opening words could be seen as a plea for help.

If Nicodemus is there to make pronouncements, though, Jesus isn’t interested. If Nicodemus is there to plead for help, Jesus is quick to cut to the chase – to turn Nicodemus’ carefully orchestrated belief system, his painfully precise way of defining who God is and what God does, completely upside down.

And Jesus will do the same thing for us, if we let him.

Think of it: our reading features the most well-known verse in the entire New Testament, perhaps in all of Scripture: John 3:16. We see “John 3:16” signs at sporting events, we see its words featured on everything from billboards to bumper stickers to coffee mugs. But for many who both promote, and who read, those words, rather than understanding John 3:16 to be a joyous pronouncement that God loves all of us – every single one – so much that the only gift good enough for us is God’s only Son… the words serve as a dividing line between those who are acceptable – believers – and those who are unacceptable.

Further, “belief,” especially in a culture so heavily influenced by Evangelicalism, is at least functionally defined as mental and verbal assent to a specific set of doctrinal statements.

If salvation were so simple, Nicodemus wouldn’t have visited Jesus, because Jesus would have had no reason to come and die and rise in the first place. We’d have it all figured out.

But what if our faith journey isn’t a daily struggle to believe the right things? What if our faith journey is a process of learning how to believe in the right way?

What Jesus says to Nicodemus, and to us, is that our faith journey is not predicated upon what we know; rather we are brought into joyous relationship with the living God though being known by God. God cannot be quantified, God cannot be photographed, God cannot be predicted. God is not a crossword puzzle, a thing to be figured out. In his First Epistle, John makes the simple, bold statement that “God is love,” and love is a mystery: wild and bold, joyous and unpredictable, one does not determine the chemical processes by which love occurs, one simply jumps in and enjoys the ride.

Marcus Borg writes in The God We Never Knew about what it means to “believe.” Rather than strict intellectual assent to propositions and claims, he speaks of belief as trust, as faithfulness, and, “in a very general sense…the belief that there’s something to all of this.” Borg says that faith that “believes God” is not something we can simply will, on our own: “we are led into it. It grows....It is not a requirement that we are to meet but a quality that grows as our relationship with God deepens.” But we do have to “take the first step,” he says, “and then another (though sometimes we are virtually pushed into this by desperation or lured into it by example or experience).” So there it is, the mystery of grace and our response, however limited, however sincere. This is where we see the difference between classic orthodoxy, “right belief,” and Peter Rollins’ “Heretical Orthodoxy,” daring rather to believe in the right way.

Believing the right way means that, rather than consulting a doctrinal checklist to make sure we are “in with the in crowd,” we are open to see where God’s Holy Spirit is blowing today. Believing the right way means that, rather than drawing the circle of acceptability closer in each day, jealously guarding our glossy sheen of righteousness, we throw the circle wide, and watch who the lifted-up and glorified Son, Jesus Christ, brings in to the fellowship.

Believing in the right way meant that Phillip was blown by the wind of the Spirit to share the Good News with the Ethiopian eunuch. Believing in the right way meant that Peter was blown by the wind of the Spirit to bring the Good News to another outcast, a Roman soldier, a centurion named Cornelius.

Who, in our life, is waiting to hear that God loves them? Who desperately needs to see and hear that the only gift good enough to fully express the depth and breadth of God’s wild, unbridled grace, God’s ebullient, irrepressible love is God’s own Son? Which way will the wind of the Spirit blow us today?