John 6:1-21
July 29, 2012
St. Michael and All Angels

Anne Lamott has a new book coming out in November. It’s called Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. I love her ability to simplify things. Years ago, I was struck by the simplicity of the prayers she prayed most often: Help me, help me, help me and thank you, thank you, thank you. Probably many of us could say the same, but we try to be a bit more flowery with our language. We don’t want our prayers to seem too abrupt. Now she has added Wow to the list. I love that! How often do you find your breath taken away by beauty or an act of kindness that pierces your heart? Hourly? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Or so long ago that you can’t remember? It’s a wonderful spiritual practice – find something every day to which there is only one response…awe. Perhaps you are stunned at the Olympic athletes who have invested their lives for a moment of physical splendor, the delicious monsoon rains that dash in and out bringing life to the earth, or those who risked their lives to save others in the Aurora shooting last week. At the end of the day, you can ask yourself, when did I experience awe today?

Our culture’s fascination with special effects can keep us from actually seeing the power of God. The last time I went to the movie with my kids, I was surprised to see that every preview was for a 3-D movie. As if regular movies with their cgi and animation aren’t enough anymore, they must all be 3-D. What’s next? What if we help our children see the beauty of a baby bird learning to fly? Or we watch together for the first star to come out at night? What if we turn off all media and take time to see the world through their eyes? I want to ask my kids every day “What is the most awesome thing you saw today?” My hope is that it will have nothing to do with a movie screen and everything to do with someone showing compassion or seeing a porcupine on the Bosque.

If we are paying attention, the scriptures today flood us with God’s abundant response to human need. What is more awesome than that? The feeding of the multitude is the only miracle in all four gospels. We hear it often enough that we may be waiting for the 3-D version of it to experience wonder. I love the first reading today…a man offers food to God and is told to feed the people with it. Imagine you bring some food for the food pantry and just as you lean over to put the food in the basket as you walk into the church, you hear God say, “feed the people”. I would whisper, “But I just brought a few cans of beans. I wasn’t expecting to feed the whole church.” The voice says again, “feed the people”. What would you do next? I can feel panic setting in because we KNOW that isn’t enough food for everyone.

That is the whole point. We aren’t bringing the WHOLE thing, we are bringing our best and then God takes it from there. It’s not all about us. I keep hearing my friend Fran Dorff sing, “Glory be to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask…or imagine.”

It’s strange that faith communities often forget that God working through us can do far more than we can ask or imagine. We keep thinking it’s up to us and we know our limitations all too well. We take our cues from ourselves rather than God. Watch what happens in the gospel. The people are following him “because they saw the signs he was doing for the sick.” (John 6:2 NRSV) Jesus immediately recognizes their hunger and asks the disciples how they will feed everyone. The disciples begin to panic. Andrew finds five loaves of bread and two fish from a boy in the crowd. Then Jesus has the crowd sit down and he takes the bread, gives thanks and shares it with all the people. When they had eaten all the bread and fish they could, the disciples gather up the leftovers. There are many theories about how so little became so much food. I find theories like that a distraction that keeps us from seeing what really happened. Jesus saw their hunger and fed them with what seemed like nothing. This text doesn’t ask us to create a spreadsheet to explain what might have happened. It simply asks us to turn our eyes toward God who steps in and showers us with an abundance that fills us with awe.

We begin with a hunger we can’t explain and we end up in a world of miracles and mystery. Sara Miles was a forty-six year old atheist who walked into St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco one Sunday and it turned her world upside down. She took communion and it changed everything. She says, “It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn’t knowing how to behave in church, or having a religious vocabulary or an a priori ‘belief’ in an abstract set of propositions: It was hunger, the same hunger I’d always carried. Holy communion knocked me upside down and forced me to deal with the impossible reality of God.” (from Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles, p. xvi)

We show up here on a Sunday morning and we make our way to the altar to receive a small piece of bread and drink a sip of wine. And that takes care of our hunger? Yes, it does. Here we encounter the great mystery of God who knows our hunger and weaves our lives together not in the places where we have it all together, but when we come with stomachs growling, hearts empty, and fearful about our future. God meets us in our vulnerability and fills us with love and a fullness that overflows.

It has been a tender week at St. Michael’s. Several people are struggling with situations that threaten to overwhelm at every turn. Here is what I have seen: the love of God carefully knitting our lives together and helping us be bread and wine for one another in our vulnerability and pain. I don’t understand how it works, but I see it and it leaves me speechless.

We show up here hungry and vulnerable and that little piece of bread and wine somehow fill us to overflowing so that we step back into the world and care for one another in ways that are beautiful and holy. The story of the feeding of the multitude implies that ALL are hungry. No one shows up and says, “No thanks. I ate before I came.” Christ sees their hunger and he feeds them. The results are astonishing. The scripture goes on to describe Jesus walking on water as the disciples find themselves out on a boat in a terrible storm. We can try and figure out how he did that or we can see what happens next…the disciples find the courage to take the next steps in a journey toward the unknown. That is what we are called to do.

Together we’ve been asking, “Who is our neighbor?” The question feels daunting because the next question is “How do we care for our neighbor?” and the underlying “What if it’s too much for us?” I can tell you with great certainty that it IS too much for us. That’s the point. As soon as we start to respond to the needs around us, we find that we are shaking in fear and we wonder if we can do this, but it isn’t up to us to make it happen. We come in our humanness and Christ meets us here to feed hungers we can’t even name with an abundance that takes our breath away and then he walks with us as we step beyond our comfort zone into a land called faith.

July 22, 2012
Cultivating the divine dimension
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

"Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." Jesus invited his friends to get off the road. They probably headed to a hillside overlooking the Lake of Gennesaret, otherwise known as the Sea of Galilee. What a great idea. A retreat with Jesus himself! Quiet time outdoors, prayer and meditation, conversation and meals around the campfire.

They could debrief what had recently been a pretty stressful few weeks: the beheading of Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, the rejection of Jesus in his hometown synagogue, and mission trips by the disciples, two by two, where in some villages they were run out of town.

All in all, it had been an intense month or so. So when Jesus suggested they take a break and reconnect with God and one another, they were no doubt eager to get away. Off they went, down to the lake. But you heard what happened. As they tried to board their boat, people from all over recognized this now-famous band of preachers and healers, and they mobbed them. Jesus had compassion, and so he paused and taught awhile.

Jesus and his friends finally shoved off, but the people, now even greater in number, wouldn’t leave them alone. They ran along the shore, and when the disciples moored the boat, people started rushing around, bringing sick people on mats, dragging them into marketplaces to heal some more. Before long, over 5,000 people had assembled, and Jesus, again having compassion, fed them all in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. This, of course, only cranked up the whole show by a number of notches.

So much for the nice, quiet lakeside retreat. They would get that time eventually, but not when and how they wanted it. For now, more pressing human needs took priority.

Something like this has no doubt happened to you. Many years ago, the night I arrived at another lake for a much-needed family vacation, I got the call I had long dreaded. A good friend’s two-year-old daughter finally succumbed to a brain tumor, and the funeral would be in a few days. I never unpacked.

We all find ourselves in this kind of situation from time to time, even if it’s less serious. It’s the end of a long workday, you’re tired, looking forward to a nice evening at home, and a fellow worker comes in with a crisis. You think “Where can I hide?” But you sigh, let go, and give yourself to the moment. Or you’re away on a long-awaited vacation, looking forward to everything you’ve planned. But a conflict with one of your kids finally has room to burst out into the open. Everything is ruined, you think, until you drop your expectations and give yourself to what is. Now it will be a different sort of week than you had planned.

But what happens when the demands of everyday life seem to prevent you from ever taking a vacation, a retreat, or even some quiet time each day for prayer or meditation? In spite of the crowds, I think that Jesus and his friends managed it from time to time. Otherwise they wouldn’t have had anything left to teach or to give - no center, no soul, no love. That’s what happens to us, too, when too many demands squeeze out all the space, all our energy. No center, no soul, no love. Just dutifully crashing through what must be done.

We all know, at least in theory, the importance of rest, sabbath, regular time with God. It refreshes our spirit, it renews our mind, it gets our heart and our body back in tune. People do this differently, of course, but I suspect you know what works for you. When you spend time doing whatever renews your spirit, life is easier, God seems more present, and you feel more patient and generous.

Why do things always seem to get in the way of this? It might be like our gospel story or the examples I used -  a serious human need that is clearly more important than self-nurture. But if we’re honest with ourselves, that’s only once in awhile, or it comes in temporary waves.

Most of the time, we don’t get around to spiritual grounding for purely internal reasons. Some of us like to feel needed or productive, and so we respond to just about anything that comes wandering our way, important or not. We’re like a dog at a whistlers’ convention.

Others think that focusing on their own spirit is self-absorbed. They hear the 23rd psalm, which we sang today, like this -  he maketh them to lie down in green pastures, he leads them beside still waters, he revives their souls. How nice that all those other people who really need God can ask for help.

Some of us fear the potential emptiness of not having any demands - who am I if I’m not busy? Is there any me there when I sit quietly in prayer in the morning, instead of busying myself with newspapers and emails? Can I just be with God, with myself, with the present moment, and not fall into an abyss?

And then others just get caught up in the habit of a stressful lifestyle, unintentionally re-creating its insistent rhythm so that it just keeps on going, like a perpetual motion machine.

Neurologists have studied the link between brain chemistry and serious addiction to digital media. I’m talking about the people who really can’t leave it alone. What they’ve found is that when something new comes along, the brain releases a little squirt of dopamine in order to quickly evaluate it. Friend or foe? Pleasure or pain? Dopamine is like adrenaline, so you feel a little rush. That’s the payoff. This is why it is so stimulating for some to endlessly, mindlessly surf the internet. Something’s always new - some image, idea, or activity. Look! Something shiny!

Similarly, we can be addicted to busyness. Constant demands, multi-tasking, complex days get the brain chemistry going and we just keep on going until we drop. And there are payoffs as we accomplish this task, as we satisfy that person’s request, as we face the next challenge. We feel satisfied. Other people like us!

But you and I are people of faith. As such, God has a claim on us, a higher claim than our habits, our addictions. The amazing thing about the divine dimension is that it is always available, in any circumstance. Whether we are on retreat or vacation in a beautiful setting, sitting quietly in meditation, hanging out with people we feel close to, in our garden, sitting at a desk, or driving the car, the kingdom of God is a breath away. Literally.

You can always stop. Close your eyes. Breathe in the Spirit. Breathe out your concerns. Stay here awhile. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, only this, here and now. Filled with God.

This, too, is habit-forming. The more we experience the divine dimension, the more want to seek it out. And the more accessible and natural it becomes. We Christians have not done a very good job of helping people build this habit. The Dalai Lama often uses the word “cultivating.” He urges us to cultivate compassion, to cultivate happiness and mental calm, to cultivate peace in the world. Cultivating suggests regular effort, like weeding, watering, digging in the messy parts like manure, watching how things are growing, knowing when to leave it alone and when to trim it back.

If there are rewards to the habits of busyness, there are more rewards to the habits of spiritual cultivation. We return to reality. We find our center. We calm down and see the simple magnificence of things as they are. We are more able to simply go through the day, whatever is taking place, one thing after the other, grounded in the Spirit all along.

And our capacity for compassion, patience, and generosity also comes more easily. That’s the whole purpose of cultivating a spiritual life, after all - not just so that we can feel tranquil and positive, but so that we can bring more goodness into God’s world.

There are times when the most spiritual thing we can do is drop self-concern and self-nurture, and turn towards those who are in need, as Jesus did that busy day along the lakeshore. But even Jesus didn’t do that all the time. He also found those quiet times to cultivate his life in the divine dimension, probably every day. It was the source of all his compassion, all his availability to the crowds, all his self-giving. It is ours as well.

July 15, 2012
Be prophetic
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

What a lovely story. The decapitation of John the Baptist. His head brought forth on a platter. I hope it gives you all the comfort and inspiration you’re searching for today!

John made the mistake of publicly criticizing King Herod’s marriage to his sister-in-law, Herodias. So when the opportunity arose, she took vengeance. At a decadent party, her dancing teenage daughter so excited Herod that he foolishly promised her anything, and the deed was done. John’s head was served up to the host like some exotic dish.

John’s end was not that unusual for a prophet. They’re generally not too popular. As Garrison Keillor has said, nobody wants a prophet at a birthday party. In our first lesson, we heard of another unpopular prophet, Amos. He was told by his king to take his annoying speeches out of Bethel, for Bethel was “the king’s sanctuary, a temple of the kingdom.” Picture Malcolm X at the White House, breathing fire.

Prophets can be like this, but not necessarily. A prophetic word is heard whenever someone rises up out of a cacophony of voices and says what needs to be said. Other voices become irrelevant and drop away. Where there was confusion, there is now clarity; where there was paralysis, there is now movement. When a tipping point comes, the prophet pushes things over.

That’s what happened when Martin Luther King came along at the right time and said things like “We must live together like brothers or perish together like fools.” Or when at the Berlin Wall Ronald Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

A prophetic word was recently spoken by our church gathered in General Convention. After 35 years of debate, division, theological study, and most importantly, lived experience, we approved rites for the blessing of same-sex couples. The tipping point had come, and the prophetic act pushed us over.

The main argument against it was that we have no business creating division by stepping ahead of other Anglicans and our ecumenical friends. We should wait until consensus can be reached. But if we had followed this advice, we never would have had women priests; we never would have had civil rights legislation. Sometimes prophetic action must be taken before consensus can be reached. Sometimes prophetic words separate those who cling to the past from those who must move forward. As Jesus said, “I came not to bring peace, but a sword that will divide.”

Now that this door has been opened in our church, now that we’ve passed the tipping point, we are able to live into a new reality, where a greater number of people can enjoy God’s blessing and the community’s support. It is a new day.

But this was not the only way in which our church was prophetic at General Convention. In fact, if you just looked around, the more obvious thing was the amazing variety of people, causes, races, languages, and perspectives. At liturgies, we heard Spanish and Creole along with English.  Fellow Anglicans came from the Sudan, Brazil, the Dominican Republic. We all rubbed elbows - oung urban activists, evangelical missionaries, scholars, puffed-up princes of the church, and wizened old monks. It was beautiful.

Why is this prophetic? Because the whole messy human family was gathered as one, and that is the kingdom of God. This doesn’t happen too often. In fact, it runs counter to the way of the world, which wants to classify by rank and social category, separate out those who don’t fit, homogenize those that remain, and retain power for the right kind of people.

But even more prophetic is the fact that our church clearly does not view the educated, white, suburban person as the norm, the one who graciously reaches out to the less fortunate “other.”  There is no “us” viewing “them” from a distance. There is only “us,” all together, in a kaleidoscopic whole. Everyone has equal voice; everyone has a place at the table.

While for some this seems chaotic, for others it is a kind of prophetic clarity that helps us deal with a society that doesn’t know what to do with the rich diversity it contains. At General Convention, we show one another that we can live together like brothers and sisters, arguing, yes, but with affection and a sense of humor. And we discover that in relationship, we’re all affected and made the better for it. We learn how the Spirit moves in the friction between us, and something new is created.

It feels like the kingdom of God, which is what we pray for, isn’t it? Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. If we can experience this in the church, we can take it out into the world, and the Lord’s Prayer is fulfilled: Your kingdom come on earth.

In this parish, we have undertaken a time of listening and discernment called Who is My Neighbor? Continuing the series, we’ll soon hear from those who work with those who are homeless or in poverty; we’ll hear from other congregations that have learned to place ministry with the underprivileged at the center of their identity instead of on the periphery.

One of the dangers as we go about this is to unintentionally reinforce existing social separation. We can see ourselves as the norm: mostly white, educated, privileged people who imagine that we have our lives together. Over there is them: mostly brown, uneducated, poor people whose lives are broken. In our graciousness, we reach out from “here” to “there,” and then go back to our lives unchanged. The social distance and power differential is kept intact; in fact, it can be reinforced by our charity.  

What is happening in the wider church is quite different. We stand together in one place and risk being influenced by the other. Whatever differences we have - whether they are racial, economic, or otherwise - are less significant than the humanity and the Spirit that unites us.

In fact, in our church today there are many who won’t use the word “outreach” or “mission” anymore. They speak instead of partnership and mutuality. In this approach, both parties are potentially changed by the encounter. Both are blessed by the experience and outlook of the other.

You’ll be hearing about this on Tuesday evening from two clergy who will be a part of the Who is My Neighbor? series. Trey and Cheri will talk about how their congregations became a part of their neighborhoods, ministering with it instead of to it.

One of the ways in which we already know how this works is within the parish. If you’ve been here awhile, you have rubbed elbows with gay and lesbian couples, old and young, transgendered people, folks with a different political perspective than your own, or simply those with different personality types. Over time, through real relationships, we are influenced. Our edges are softened. We’re more comfortable with the mystery that is humanity.

In fact, every time a new person comes to this parish, we are all changed. We become a different community, because each of us brings something new into the mix. New members don’t conform themselves to a fixed “thing” that is St. Michael and All Angels. “They” don’t join “us” in what we are doing. New people help us evolve into what we are all in a process of becoming. The Spirit moves within the friction between us, and something new comes into being of its own.

The same can be true in our relationship with those outside the walls of this church. As we dare to get to know our neighbor, we both will be changed. They might see a church that doesn’t fit their stereotype of church, and we might learn a different way of understanding the forces that shape their lives. The Spirit will move, and something new will be created.

We have the opportunity here to be prophetic. In a world that keeps people apart, we can bring them together. In a world that creates separated groups of people who share similar world-views, we can mix it up. This does not create chaos or insecurity. In fact, it creates order and stability, because it helps us to live more harmoniously, with mutual understanding and respect, with greater creativity.

God needs prophets in every age, in order to bring life where there is stagnation. You don’t have to be a fire-breather in order to be a prophet. All you have to do is be willing to risk going against the grain, and in this case, by getting to know a wider circle of God’s people. The Spirit will take it from there, and God’s kingdom will come on earth.

“Who is this? Where did he get all this wisdom?
Have you heard about the amazing things he’s done?”

The reaction of Jesus’ hometown folks starts out similar to the reaction of the disciples in the story we read two weeks ago about Jesus calming the storm at sea.
When they saw Jesus command the wind, the disciples asked,
“Who is this?”
When they hear Jesus teach in the synagogue,
the people of Nazareth are amazed at what they are hearing, and they ask,
“Where does this man get all this?”
They are astonished also by the “deeds of power” they have seen or heard about.

But, all too quickly, they move to squelch their astonishment with scorn.
“Wait a minute. That’s Jesus. You know, Mary’s son –
the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon.
Is that the Jesus everyone has been talking about?
He’s just a builder. He’s no one special.”

And with that attitude, they close themselves off to seeing or hearing
who Jesus really is.
They do not listen to him.
They do not seek his help.
They limit him by refusing to see who he has become and what he can do.

The story doesn’t just say his hometown folks don’t believe.
Jesus defies their expectations, steps out of his place in the social order,
    and they are scandalized.
No mere builder teaches in the synagogue!
Who is he to make claims about God?

Biblical scholar and prolific author John Dominic Crossan writes in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography that the system of social class and honor in Galillean society was a zero-sum system.
If  the people gave Jesus respect and honor greater than his due as a poor builder,
    someone else in the community loses that honor.
They just can’t have it.

But there is a deeper issue at play here than “familiarity breeds contempt,”
or even social prejudice.
At the center of this text is the scandal of the incarnation.
If God – the God who created heaven and earth and breathes life into all living things
– if God decided to become human – why this human?
This Jesus was not the messiah everyone awaited –
not a warrior to free them from Rome,
not a priest or learned scholar. For heaven’s sake, he ‘s poor.

Crossan quotes Celsus, a pagan philosopher who wrote an attack on Christianity called “True Doctrine” in about 180 C.E. The great offense of this faith was not the claim that a human could be born of a virgin or that a human could be divine – but the idea that it could happen to a member of the lower class. In Crossan’s words: “Class snobbery is, in fact, very close to the root of Celsus’s objection to Christianity.”


Class snobbery is also a factor when the Galileans look at the company Jesus keeps.
Fishermen? Tax collectors?
Really, Jesus – that’s who you hang out with?

Yes, and not only hang out with, but send out –
to carry God’s mission into the world.

Jesus has called a number of people to follow him,
and he has crowds who follow him around –
but 12 he has chosen as his disciples.
It is not clear why he chooses this twelve.
The last time we heard Jesus address this crew in Mark’s gospel he was saying,
    “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
But they have been with him on his journey.
They have listened to his parables and teachings.
They have witnessed him casting out demons and doing amazing miracles of healing.
Now he sends them to do the same –
to teach and cast out demons and heal in God’s name.

This sort of takes the whole Incarnation idea one step further.
If Jesus was here today, would he be a bishop?
A bank president? A professional athlete?
No. Quite possibly he would be the nice guy bagging groceries at Albertsons.
Or one of those young people taking a break before college, traveling around by bike and rarely seeing a shower.

And who does Jesus send?
Not just seminary professors and Bible scholars and priests.
In fact, I think we church professionals and academics have it easy.
I mean, everyone expects me to talk about God - it’s my job!

But the ones chosen for mission in the world – that’s you, my friends.
You are called here to St Michael’s to be fed at the table, encouraged by the word –
    and then go out to share the good news and heal the sick and feed the poor.

Because one thing this passage makes very clear is that
following Jesus carries some responsibility.
How we respond to Jesus makes a difference.
When Jesus meets the contempt and unbelief of the people in Nazareth,
    his mighty works are limited.
The story says that “He could do no deed of power there, except that he laid hands on a few sick people and cured them. He was amazed at their unbelief.”
Jim Callahan wrote in a Christian Century article,
“Strange how hardened hearts can cut even God off at the pass.”

How we respond to Jesus has a great deal to do with how we live in the world –
    whether we accept the grace and comfort the Word made flesh can offer –
    whether we take on the role of discipleship in our own lives day by day.

And the wonder of the incarnation doesn’t stop at God becoming flesh in Jesus Christ,
    or in God choosing regular folks like you and me to do God’s work.
God is incarnate in the world in so many ways,
    and our lives and faith are richer when we respond with open eyes and hearts.

Callahan concludes his article on the scandal of the incarnation:
Yes, his mama was Mary, and he had sisters and brothers with names and faces and backaches. The Gospels proclaim that God was his father, and he proclaimed that God is your father and mother too, and mine, and everyone’s. When we begin to really believe that, when we seek God in the ordinary, daily wash of things and find God in nothing more complicated than each other and in God’s beautiful, dangerous, gorgeous creation, "mighty works" begin to happen. Works of mercy and compassion. Works of healing and commiseration. Works of forgiveness and understanding and of great laughter. Frederick Buechner was right, I believe, in asserting that miracles do not evoke faith so much as faith evokes miracles.
What that poor crowd of Nazarenes was cutting off at the pass had to do not only with God, but with their neighbors and spouses and children, and whatever they knew of community. It was probably a world where anyone who cooked was just a cook, any tradesman just a competitor, any lawyer just a crook. Anyone’s wife was just a woman, anyone’s daughter was a nuisance. It was a bleak world, with no wonder, no enticing mystery, no great expectations and precious little hope. They seem to have suffered not only a loss of nerve (which may be another word for faith) but also a loss of awareness -- of consciousness.
Maybe that was the case in Nazareth. Maybe most of the time that’s the case with us too, Maybe we need to go back to our lessons from safety patrol: Stop, look and listen! Know a prophet when you see one; learn the wondrous truth when you hear it. Maybe that’s the way we get to let God cut us off at the pass and then lead us into the eternal life, which begins in the here and now, of realizing the wonder we see in each other’s faces.


Who is this?
Our challenge is to answer that question more and more with the understanding
 that we are seeing Jesus, at work in the world all around us.
And our response is to know the wonder of God’s love for the world –
for us and for all people and for all creation –
that God became incarnate and still becomes incarnate
in the wonderful, wild beauty of this life.  

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

July 1, 2012
Healing society
The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

We can say many things about the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but more than anything else, he was a healer. We’ve just heard of two miracles - a young girl raised from the dead, and a woman freed from years of hemorrhages. In both cases, and in dozen of other similar stories in the gospels, Jesus acts immediately, without question, out of his boundless compassion for anyone who suffers. He was a healer. This drew people to him and made him famous.

In our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon this morning, we also heard how central healing is to God’s purposes for all creation. God did not make death, it says. God created all things that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome.

Healing, compassion, and wholesomeness continue to be God’s purpose for us. They are also at the center of our ministry. We ask for God’s forgiveness; we pray for and visit the sick and those in crisis; we receive healing and spiritual wholeness in the Eucharist; and we aim for reconciliation in all our relationships.

However, our hope for healing and our call to be healers is not limited to our personal lives alone. Many of you are engaged in social work, teaching, advocacy, medical care, or counseling. Each of these offer a different form of healing for society. Every Sunday we pray for the healing of the nations. Every time we renew our baptismal covenant, we say that we will strive for justice and peace.

This broad understanding of healing is woven throughout the scriptures, and it has always been a part of most religious traditions. We are expected to be healers of society.

Last week the Supreme Court made its ruling on an historic piece of legislation that has to do with social healing: the Affordable Care Act. Let’s keep in mind that beneath all the arguing about how this law might affect the role of government and the economy, the new law was designed to try to improve the health of millions of our fellow citizens who have not had access to adequate medical care.

We may disagree about the possible effects of this law over time. But its intention is consistent with the life and ministry of Jesus, the work of the Christian Church, and God’s intention for humanity, expressed throughout scripture: it is an effort to bring healing to the people.

And so today I’d like to take this opportunity to address the question of how our faith can be lived out in the public arena, of which this legislation is but one example. Let’s start at the beginning, where our highest value lies.

I would hope that regardless of political affiliation, every follower of Jesus Christ would do his or her best to place the person of Christ and his teachings at the center of their life - their whole life. Jesus did not come just to offer a little spiritual comfort for our personal situations. His was not a Time Magazine approach to faith, where religion has a little isolated section alongside other sections like international relations, entertainment, and opinion.

Jesus came with a vision that encompasses and integrates everything into one: our personal life and faith, yes, but also how we treat fellow workers and employees, our social prejudices, war and peace, and the relations between the wealthy and the poor. We see this throughout the gospels, and we are invited to give our whole life to Christ.

This is what it means for Jesus to be our “Lord.” Now this title is pretty outdated. It suggests  power, subjugation and obedience, none of which is very attractive to us. “Lord” and “Master” are feudal terms, or, worse yet, the language of slavery. This is why, in our use of inclusive liturgical language, we are now sometimes supplementing this title with other words.

But Lordship isn’t all bad. For a little child, a loving and wise parent is a kind of Master. It is the parent’s responsibility to exercise this authority with wisdom, kindness and flexibility. Where this is true, the child looks to the parent as someone who has their best interests at heart, and so, at least until they must individuate, they trust and they follow. The “Lordship,” if you will, of parents over small children, is integrative, holistic. It encompasses safety, ethics, health, education, food, love - everything.

Jesus is our Lord in this sense. As a human being who is filled with the love and truth of God, we trust that his guidance for us is God’s intention for humanity. We trust that he has our best interests at heart. And so we do our best to follow him.  

Jesus’ guidance is integrative, holistic, like a good parent. It leaves no part of our life out. If you read the gospels, you see that Jesus asks that everything be brought into what he called “the kingdom of God”: every relationship, every attitude towards individuals or social groups that differ from us, every action, even every thought and feeling.  God’s reign is complete, and Jesus is Lord of all. That’s what it means to be his follower. And when we respond holistically to this call, when we leave nothing out, it saves us, it sets us free, and it creates healing all around us.

And so an intentionally Christian approach to social and political healing, justice, and peace is not just one of many options for any of us, alongside other approaches. If we claim Jesus as Lord, we can’t trump his priorities here and there, saying “Well, Jesus’ ways are just not practical. Not here, not now.”

But here’s the rub. While Christians may not be at liberty to dismiss Jesus’ teachings in certain areas of their lives, we are at liberty to disagree about how best to put them into practice. And we haven’t been very good about how to talk about this together.

Instead, in sermons and in prayers and conversation, we bandy about fuzzy terms like “social justice, peace and compassion,” as if everyone agreed what pursuing these ideals should look like. Liberals are particularly bad about this. We can come across as if the only legitimate ways to live out these ideals are those proposed by the left. I’ve even seen a bumper sticker that says “Jesus was a Democrat.” To the extent that I’ve contributed to this sort of thing over the years, I apologize to those of you who are conservatives. We’ve sometimes made it seem as if you couldn’t possibly have anything to contribute to justice, peace, and compassion.

On the other hand, Christians on the right have not been very good about articulating a vision that is grounded firmly in the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They sometimes seem to temporarily put his teachings on a shelf when it comes to the cold hard facts of business, the justice system, war, the environment, and other social issues.

I want to hear about conservative versions of Christly compassion and healing for the poor, for those caught in cycles of violence and crime, for those who don’t have access to decent healthcare or education, and for our enemies.

The important thing for us as the Body of Christ is to try to live his teachings holistically - in our personal world, at our place of employment, and in our political views and actions. But because we’re so complex and diverse, we will never agree just how to do this. That’s okay.

The most we can do is hold up the person and teaching of Jesus Christ as authoritative for all of us, and support one another as we try, in our diverse ways, to be more faithful to his vision of building the kingdom of God here on earth.

Soon we will enter the final phase of an election cycle. Starting this week our church will gather in Indianapolis for General Convention. During both, there will be passionate arguments from different points of view. Both secular and ecclesiastical politics can get ugly. We can end up questioning the integrity, motivation, and faith of our opponents.

You and I are called to be healers in this world, as Jesus was. This not only means that Jesus Christ should guide us to conclusions about how to heal society. It also means that he should guide our way of disagreeing, even our inner thoughts about our opponents. This is healing work, too, badly needed in our day.

The Church offers a perfect environment for this healing work to take place. For after we disagree honestly about how to best put into practice our common faith, we can then embrace and turn to this table together. Here our Lord nourishes us all, that we might continue, in our different ways, on this journey of faith.