Sermon for 8.26.12

Scriptures for this week are Here

Neil Armstrong died yesterday, the first man to walk on the moon.  What you may not know is that the first food and drink ever shared on the moon was the Body and Blood of Christ: Buzz Aldrin brought consecrated bread and wine from his church in Houston, and there in the lunar module, he and Neil shared communion before the moonwalk.

This is going to “out” me as a “woman of a certain age,” but I remember that moonwalk quite clearly.  I was a child – too young to be staying up that late – but my parents insisted.  They said I would never forget the night I watched a man walk on the moon (and they’re right, so far).  So I stayed up late, wrapped in my fluffy purple bathrobe, sat squished between my mother and my father on the old beige couch in the living room, leaned my head on my father’s shoulder, and worked hard to keep my eyes open as the television screen showed fuzzy black and white pictures.  And I watched as a man in a white spacesuit climbed down a ladder onto the moon, and I listened as the static-y voice said, 

“That’s one small step for man … one giant leap for mankind.”

Afterward, later that night before my parents finally put me to bed, my father and I decided to walk outside and look up at the moon, to see if it was different with those dusty footprints on the surface.  We walked out into the warm summer night, he held my hand, and we gazed up.  I looked at the moon, so tiny and so high up, so white and so cold in the darkness, and I said, I don’t see the astronauts up there.  My father smiled and said, that’s because they’re so far away that you can’t see them – but they’re there.

And it seemed to me, as I stood there in my fuzzy slippers, holding my father’s hand and gazing up, that I stood at the center of the universe – that that sidewalk where I stood in an apartment complex in Philadelphia was a little point around which everything else revolved – that the night sky with all its stars, with the tiny moon and the tinier astronauts, made a circle all around us where we stood, and beyond that somewhere, making a big circle around the entire outside of the sky, somewhere beyond everything I could see, was God, encompassing everything, encircling it all.

God was so very, very far away that I could never see him.  But somehow, God could see the astronauts, and God could see all the people standing on the earth gazing up into the sky, and God could see me.  Because God was very far away, yet God was very close – as close as my father holding my hand, and as loving and protective.  That’s how it seemed to me.

Which is not so far from how the ancient Jewish people saw God – God as far away, enthroned in a heaven that somehow encircled the earth and the sky, and encompassed everything there was, with the earth at the center of the universe, and the Temple in Jerusalem as the center point of everything on earth.  They knew that God was far away and higher up than anything they could imagine; yet they knew that God also makes God’s home right here with human beings. 

Solomon’s prayer in the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures today dedicates the Temple in Jerusalem to the God of Israel.  Yet the Jews never thought God could be contained in any one structure, so Solomon calls the Temple a home for God’s name, not a home for God – he knows the Temple can never contain all of God’s glory.  Where other ancient peoples worshiped idols that could be localized in a place or even a statue, the Jews always knew their God to be much bigger than human imagination.  So when they built the Temple in Jerusalem, the magnificent Temple, full of gold and marble, one of the great wonders of the world, they built it not as a home for God – but as a connection point, a passageway between heaven and earth; a place where people could experience God’s presence .

The Jews knew just as well as we do, that God is found everywhere, that every moment of their lives was infused with God’s presence, if only they could open their minds to understand that presence – so God was far away and yet as close as their own hands and lips and hearts.  Which is why they saw every human act as holy and blessed – the kosher laws recognized that the smallest, most human of acts, like eating, was a holy thing, done in thanksgiving and recognition of God’s blessing, the gift of life.

Yet, because human beings cannot always see God’s presence in ordinary life, because we don’t always remember to look up, because we get caught up in the ordinary stuff of human life, and forget that every molecule is a gift from God, we create places where we come together, places where we experience God’s presence in worship.  Places where, as Solomon says in his prayer, God’s name shall be there – a focal point for us to experience God’s presence.

Solomon dedicates the ancient Temple in today’s prayer.  In this ceremony, the ark, which holds the very tablets that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai, as a cloud descended on the mountain and Moses talked to God, face to face – that same ark, with the stone tablets, has been carried from place to place until this time.  In today’s reading, it is carried in and placed in the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. 

This moment of homecoming for the ark is so holy a moment, so infused with the experience of the presence of God, that the Bible can only describe it as a cloud that filled the temple, the glory of God filling the house of the Lord.  And Solomon stands before the altar and prays that God’s presence will be with all who pray there – all Jews who come and offer sacrifices, and all foreigners too, all outsiders who don’t know God and yet yearn to experience God’s presence; that God may hear their prayers and answer them.

I read this account of the dedication of God’s Temple, and I picture this image of a cloud filling the Temple, and my question becomes: where and how do we experience God’s presence? 

I was lucky enough to go to Russia this summer – a land of contrasts, where you can see the gilded palaces of czars, filled with priceless artworks, next to blocks and blocks of Soviet-era apartment buildings, gray and square and stern, with conscious efforts to erase all beauty and distinction.  In the middle of all this, you can see the beautiful Russian churches, gilded and domed.  At the time of the Russian Revolution, there were 1,000 churches in St. Petersburg.  During the Soviet era, that number was reduced to 5 or 6 – people were too afraid to come – and lovely old churches were used as warehouses.  But, our tour guide told us, people never forgot their religion – they never forgot Jesus – in quiet, people kept telling the stories of Jesus.  And after communism fell, many people came and were baptized, and churches began to reopen – now there are 500 churches open in St. Petersburg.

We visited a number of them, and I had a similar experience in several of them.  One of the was the church called “Savior on the Spilled Blood” in St. Petersburg.  I walked into the cathedral, a feast for the senses, sparkling with color, and I gazed up and up into the golden domes, soaring overhead – and beautiful as it was, I didn’t see God there.

I looked around at the arches, the color-infused mosaics, the icons of Jesus and Mary and other saints, infused with architectural beauty – and stunning though it was, I didn’t see God there.

Then I heard music, and walked over to a tiny side chapel, and saw a congregation gathered for a midday service – a priest in vestments of gold, a small choir singing soaringly beautiful chants, incense rising in the air, and a group of worshipers, standing and bowing and crossing themselves.  I watched a woman enter with her daughter, and she showed the girl how to cover her head, and guided her hand to light a candle, and held her hand and showed her when to bow and when to make the sign of the cross, and I thought of the thousands of people in that church who had done the same thing, and millions of others who stand in worship and pray throughout the world every day, and the one or two hundred of us who do the same thing each week at Nativity. 

And in the middle of that group of worshipers in a resurrected church in a reawakening city – that’s where I saw the presence of God.  Because God is in the midst of us – God dwells in the community of worship.  God is with us when we pray.  God is with us when we tell the stories of Jesus.  And God is with us in the small and ordinary elements of bread and wine that we share, because Christ has chosen to come to us in this way.

And I think we know, here at Nativity, that any place can be infused with the presence of God – we who have created a beautiful place to worship in an ordinary office building on a very unremarkable street – but it’s not the beautiful things that make it holy.  We are building a bigger, more beautiful home for this church now.  But we build it not because God will live there.  We build it to gather a community:  the ones who are here already, and the outsiders that Solomon prayed for, who yearn for the presence of God, who we are called to reach. 

We build it so that in this community, we can experience the presence of God.  We build it so that generations of people can know his glory, glory that encompasses the universe, and yet is as close to us as our own hands and hearts, as close as the bread we eat and wine we drink, as we stand at the still center point of the beautiful turning world.

Sermon for 8.12.12

Scriptures for today are Here

I love the Olympics: I love the competitions, the drama, the fresh-faced athletes doing remarkable feats: the Michael Phelpses, the Missy Franklins, the US women’s soccer team.  And I love the non-US athletes too – like Katie Taylor, the Irish gold medalist in women’s boxing, and Usain Bolt, the fastest man alive, and Oskar Pistorius, the double amputee who sprints on two prosthetic legs. 

You look at those incredibly well-trained bodies and the things they do seem almost impossible, and yet you know that the moment of glory atop the medal stand is not the real story of their lives – the real story is what got them there.  These are folks who have spent almost every waking hour for years and years, doing the same things over and over and over, trying and failing and trying again – because that’s what it takes to become the best at a sport.

And yet there’s more to it than just practicing – these are people who have physical gifts, of strength and speed and flexibility, that you and I don’t have.  I read an article recently that said that many professional dancers have two genes that are different than the genes that most people have – there is something in their genetic makeup that means they were truly “born to dance.”  And I’m sure the same can be said of world-class gymnasts and swimmers and runners too – not to mention world-class writers, musicians, physicists, doctors, and so on.  Something in each of us makes us uniquely talented to do the things we are best at: because it begins with natural gifts, long before the years of work.

The fresh-faced, bubbly, incredibly poised winner of the women’s all-around gymnastics gold medal, Gabby Douglas, said after she won, “I give all the glory to God. It’s kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to him and the blessings fall down on me.” 

Some athletes who thank God for big wins seem to think it was God’s will to hand them the victory (and hand their opponents the loss).  But it seems to me that Gabby has more advanced wisdom: she seems to understand that God gave her the gifts she needed to become a great gymnast, and that everything she does to develop that gift, and delight in it, and give delight to others through it, gives glory back to God.  She understands her talent as a gift that came first to her, that she gives back.

That movement, of a gift that comes from God and then goes back to God, is what we can see in our scriptures today.  In the gospel, we read today the continuation of a story that we have been following for several weeks now.  Jesus is teaching in the wilderness, the crowds follow him, and when they get hungry, Jesus commands the disciples to feed them with a few loaves and fishes.  This is a vitally important story for Christians to know:  we can tell because unlike most stories, it appears in all four gospels.  So somehow this feeding story is a key to our faith, if we use it to unlock the right door, and understand what it is saying to us.

But where the other gospels leave that story for us to wonder about and marvel over, in John’s gospel, Jesus tell the disciples what this feeding means – essentially, he says that what he has done is, he has acted out a real-life parable.  A parable is something that surprises us, that opens our eyes to a deeper reality, that gives us layers of meaning to explore and experience.  Often parables are stories Jesus tells – there once was a man who had two sons, there once was a vineyard whose owner went away to a far country, etc.  In John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t tell parables so much as he acts them out, in the miracles he performs.  The miracles are signs that point us to what God is doing through Jesus – symbols that open our eyes to a deeper reality.

So Jesus doesn’t just feed the crowds just to prevent them from starving, or even to get ooh’s and aah’s because he’s a miracle worker.  He very carefully shows how this miracle explains what God is doing through him, by reminding his Jewish audience of the most important story of their history, when Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, across the wilderness of Sinai to the Promised Land.

During their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, they got hungry and started complaining against Moses, the same way the people in today’s story start complaining – and God sends them bread to eat – manna in wilderness, bread in the desert that saves their life and sustains them on journey to freedom.  This bread they eat becomes the sign of the most important gift God gave to the Jewish people – the gift of freedom in the Promised Land.  They still eat the bread of freedom today, in the Passover matzoh that helps them remember the journey from slavery to freedom.

Over a thousand years later, Jesus acts out this ancient story by giving the people bread in the wilderness once more – then he turns the story on its head by saying something astonishing: he says, I am the Bread of Life.  Jesus takes manna story a step further: he says he is not only our Bread of Freedom, but also our Bread of Life.  Jesus is the manna that God has given us to eat, the bread that keeps us alive in our life’s deserts, the bread that means we will never be hungry again, the gift that ensures that we will never die.

So Jesus is more than someone one who satisfies our physical hunger: he is soul food, spiritual food, food that fills our true emptiness, the emptiness we experience in our spirits if we try to live a life without God.  He is the one God has sent to fill what French mathematician Blaise Pascal called the God-shaped hole in our hearts. 

Pascal talked about the emptiness and longing that most humans feel at some point.  Pascal said: "What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in us a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This we try in vain to fill with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself."

The achievements, the possessions, the entertainments and pleasures that we work so hard for are ultimately empty – they will not fill the hole in our hearts.  Jesus is the gift that God has given us before we worked for the gift, before we deserved the gift, before we even knew we needed a gift.  Jesus is the food that satisfies our emptiness and our longing.

And in a sense, the Olympic athlete this gift reminds me of is not Gabby Douglas so much as Lopez Lomong, the US track team member who ran the 5,000 meters yesterday.  He finished in 10^th place, so he won’t be taking any medals home, but the race he won started long before this Olympics.  If you don’t know his story, look it up – it’s amazing.  Born in South Sudan in a tiny village without running water or electricity, he lived in one-room hut with his family, helped his parents grow subsistence crops without even a plow.

At age 6, he was in church one day when armed soldiers broke in, kidnapped him and the other children present, took them to a camp to become child soldiers, where they were starved and mistreated.  Three older boys befriended him, and one night, the four of them escaped from the camp and started running.  They ran without stopping for three days and three nights, in a journey he tells about in his book, Running for My Life, until they found their way to a refugee camp in Kenya, where he stayed for a number of years.

One day someone in the refugee camp said, the Olympics are on TV, let’s go watch.  Lopez didn’t know what the Olympics were, but he walked five miles to watch on a black and white TV, saw Michael Johnson of the US win the gold medal, saw him standing on medal stand with tears running down his face – and never forgot that moment.

Years later, he had the chance to come to the US as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan admitted as a refugee.  He was adopted by an American family, started running track, went to college, and in 2007 became a US citizen.  In 2008 he was selected as a member of the US Olympic team, and in Beijing was chosen to carry the US flag in the opening ceremonies – the biggest honor of his life. 

For Lopez Lomong, he received the gift of new life before he deserved it, a gift he never knew was possible – all his work of training and running for his adopted country came afterwards, out of gratitude for the new life he had been given.

For us, the amazing thing is that God gives us the gift of life long before we deserve it, for no other discernible reason than that God loves us.  Jesus says today, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws them.”  That means that every single person who is here today is here because God wanted you here, drew you here to this place of new life.  You may think you are here for other reasons – you like the people, or you want something for your children, or someone else made you come.

And you may think that something in you doesn’t deserve to be here, doesn’t deserve to be forgiven and loved and cherished by God.  And you may wonder what God wants from you, and whether you have time or energy to include God in your life.

But the truth is, every person who comes to God is here because God hungered for us.  God is empty without us, just as we are without God.  God wanted us here, drew us here.  God gave us the gift of eternal life.  God loved us so much that God was willing to give the life of his Son for us. 

God is not something we add to our lives in order to make us better people, to help us stand atop our own medal stands in life.  God is the ground of our being, the giver of all gifts, the one who makes everything in our lives possible.

So as you come to the altar today, to share in the bread of life – remember that this bread is a sign that points us to the deepest truth of all.  God has given us all the gifts we need.  And God, through this gift, is drawing us deeply into God’s eternal life.