10th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 12, Year B – Bill Harkins
The Collect
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.Amen.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3:14-21
I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: John 6:1-21
Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” …
When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.
In the Name of the God of Creation who loves us all…Amen. Grace to you and peace, to each of you this morning, on this Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, and welcome to Holy Family. If you are visiting with us we are so very glad you are here. Welcome, and be sure to introduce yourselves to us!
Today we hear a heartfelt and deeply compelling prayer from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and a lovely, well-known story about the feeding of the 5,000. Both are reminders that we can choose between scarcity and abundance, and the Gospel does call us to err on the side of abundance. This is especially true in a culture of scarcity, anxiety, and increasing polarization in which we measure ourselves and others by comparison, fear, and either/or ways of being in the world.
I suppose we each have moments in our lives that seem timeless—moments in relation to which we look back and say “From that time on…” as if we are simultaneously participating in and observing events as they unfold. Often such moments, though simple, contain bits of clarity and wisdom. Occasionally, they are moments of transcendence. We might even say of them that in relation to a particular issue, we see things in a way we had not before. I think this is what Paul is saying to us in his lovely prayer, to which we bear witness this morning. Begging the question, what might it be like to live as if we believe, in wholehearted ways, when Paul tells us that God’s power, working within us, is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can imagine or ask? What if the story of the feeding of the 5,000 is really an invitation to practice abundance, and let go of our fears, as the Gospel text suggests? I am ashamed to say how often I let my own fears be at risk of taking over, and guiding my actions. This is why some version of “be not afraid” is the most frequent phrase in the New Testament. A few years ago I stumbled upon this poem by Truman Cooper, entitled “See Paris First”:
Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”
I believe both Paul and John, in the Gospel for today, are like friends calling us to live lives not in bondage to fear, but creatively, imaginatively, and abundantly, trusting God’s faithful and abiding love—calling us to “see Paris first.”
When we are afraid, and living out of a theology of scarcity, we are kept in bondage to the past, to our anxious fears of not being enough, and in so doing we are at risk of repeating old narratives not necessarily our own. I recall just such a moment a number of years ago that seemed to bubble up from my own subconscious this week.
It has to do with baseball, a game, as former President of Yale and Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti said, is “Designed to break our hearts.”[i] When our boys were younger, I coached their teams until they began to play for their high school programs. By the time younger son Andrew went off to college I had 30 plaques of teams I’d coached over the years, hung on the walls of my study. On this particular day, our oldest son Justin was 9 or 10. I was the coach of his team, ensconced in the third-base coaching box. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with baseball, the third-base coach is a key position. From that vantage point one has a view of the entire field, and a perspective on the game which includes sending the runner, when appropriate, to home plate. I love this about baseball; the ultimate goal is to make it safely back home, and baseball has no “clock” as it were. Time is so variable as to almost have no meaning…like the distinction between “chromos”—or clock time—and “Kairos”—or spirit time. Our son was the lead-off batter, a duty he maintained all through high school. He could hit to the opposite field with power, and he was very fast. He jumped on the first pitch and drove it into the gap in right center field. As he neared first base, his first-base coach waved him on to second, while the right and center fielders converged on the ball that had rolled against the fence. As my son neared second, he looked toward the third base coach—in this case his own father—who enthusiastically waved him to third. Meanwhile the outfielder—I cannot recall which one—picked up the ball and threw it to the second baseman, who effectively served as the cut-off man. As my son approached third, the little second baseman wheeled and threw a perfect strike to his teammate at third. It was a beautiful play. My son slid in a cloud summer dust, just as the third baseman laid down the tag. The umpire, positioned perfectly, yelled “you’re out.” And it was the right call. My son looked up at me and said “Dad, you told me to go.” And in an instant I thought of my own at times intensely competitive nature, my own father, who would have told me I had not run fast enough or that I took too wide a turn at second, and I thought of the run we needed, now out at third…all of this at once. And I said “I know, buddy, it’s OK. Go on back to the dugout.”
Well, the drive home was very quiet, and I was afraid, out to sea in stormy weather, fearful of a scarcity in my own soul. But then something in me spoke, out from the depths of my being, and I said, “You know, buddy, I am so very proud of you. You did exactly what we taught you to do… we run the bases aggressively to manufacture runs, we do, and we don’t apologize for it. Coach Alexander told you to go to second. You did that perfectly. You looked down at the third base coach like we’ve taught you. He just happened to be your own dad, and I made the call. They made a great play, and we have to tip our caps to them. But the most important thing is…this is not the last time I will be wrong. As much as fathers wish we could be right all the time, we can’t. But even when I am wrong, even when I make mistakes, I want you to know how very much I love you and how very proud I am of you.” And suddenly, somehow, things between us seemed OK again. The time had come, if you will, for the image I had—maybe we both had—of me being the all-knowing, wise father who was never wrong—certainly not about baseball—to die. I had to decide what was more important: being right, in control, and winning all the time, or dying to my old image of myself, and the father I wanted to appear to be in my son’s eyes, in the service of a new relationship with my son. I had to lose myself, to find a new way of being a father. It is more important to be in relationship than it is to be right…and we can love ourselves and others completely, without complete understanding. I am still learning this, even today, with all of you.
The question put before us in today’s Gospel is this: are we willing to be vulnerable enough to be agents of God? Are we strong enough—not powerful enough or “never wrong enough”—strong enough, to be paradoxically vulnerable in love, and abundant in faith, and wholehearted in relation to fears that might keep us in bondage? Are we willing to become like that which we celebrate in the Eucharist, Christ’s Body broken for us? Are we willing to let our hearts be troubled by the harrowing experience of the suffering of others and ourselves, and yet to persevere nonetheless? Are we willing to trust God’s wisdom and grace without trying to control the outcome, even if it means losing who we thought we were in the process? These are the questions that lead us into the mystery of the Resurrection. And as we relive the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus we experience one of the great ironies of our lives together in this community of faith; that it is not our weaknesses that inhibit the power of God’s love in our lives, but rather, it is our fears. There, as Paul’s heartfelt prayer suggests, we are called “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Well, dear one’s, “From that time on,” my son and I were on a different kind of journey together. That day, we learned that a father can get his son called out at third, and together they can still make it safely home. That home may be a different place than the one they left that morning, but it is where Love lives, just down the third base line on a sunny Georgia baseball field. In the Gospel for today Jesus is reminding us that sometimes when we lose ourselves, our old lives, for his sake…when we are willing to die with and into him, there he is waiting for us, loving us, feeding us abundantly, with compassion for our weaknesses and limitations. And there we find our true selves and “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” we let go of our fears of not being enough…fears born of scarcity. And there, no matter what, we are safe at home. Amen.