"Taste and See That the Lord Is Good"

Homily for Sunday, July 29^th

Lessons:

Psalm 34 

2 Kings 4:42-44

A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, "Give it to the people and let them eat." But his servant said, "How can I set this before a hundred people?" So he repeated, "Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the LORD, `They shall eat and have some left.'" He set it before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the LORD.

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.

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?" He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, "Six months' wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little." One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?" Jesus said, "Make the people sit down." Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, "Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost." So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world."

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

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.

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.

Homily:

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

In this valley, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good is a long-standing tradition.  Today we will honor the many good cooks Graves Mill has produced by carrying on an old chapel tradition with our 5^th Sunday dinner on the grounds. Breaking bread together, sharing our blessings with one another, we commemorate Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand. 

Seeing that the Lord is good has also been a blessing of this valley. Since its first settlers arrived in the 1700s, the breathtaking beauty of Graves Mill has attracted people and made them want to stay here.  For those early colonizers, many of whom came from the British Isles, this place must have looked like home.  Graves, Jenkins, Hawkins, Lillard, Estes, McDaniel, Berry—these are just some of the family names of the folks who found our valley and these blue mountains as familiar as England, Scotland, or Wales.

In Friday night’s opening ceremony of the Olympics, the landscape, history, and culture of the British people were celebrated. Being an English major and an unapologetic Anglophile, I loved the whole show.  The pastoral scenes, with green pastures, milling sheep, and Glastonbury Tor in the distance certainly reminded me of Graves Mill. Unlike Britain, where the industrial revolution overshadowed the rural culture, Graves Mill has remained a farming community. A hundred years ago, there was a narrow gauge railroad that ran all the way from Somerset in Orange County right by this chapel and up into the mountains, built by a lumber company. Imagine how many trees they must have extracted from these hills to make their investment in a timber train  worthwhile. Now, I don’t know if any trace of the railroad remains. I’ve never come across one. The idyllic rolling pastures have prevailed.

The setting for today’s famous gospel story takes place on such a pastoral hillside. Jesus, the good shepherd, has attracted quite a flock around him, hungry for his words and loath to leave.  He certainly could have said a prayer of blessing over them, dispersed them, sent them home.  But that was not his plan. As in the story of the prophet Elisha, Jesus wants to demonstrate the gracious generosity of God to the 5000 people gathered near him. His disciples are in disbelief when he says he will feed all 5000 of them with five loaves of bread and two fish.  After Jesus tells the people to sit down, he himself says a prayer over the food and passes among all of those gathered, giving them bread and fish, enough to satisfy their hunger and some to spare.  As in the Last Supper, when he breaks bread and shares bread and wine with his disciples, Jesus shows us how to value the intimacy of dining with others.

Prefiguring the sacrament of communion, when we break and share the body and blood of Christ, the feeding of the five thousand represents a fundamental facet of our faith: love.  We love one another enough to take care of each other’s most basic needs.  Feeding hungry people is simply what we are supposed to do.

Surely some of those 5000 believed magic had been performed on their behalf, and believing that, they wanted to make Jesus their king. This miracle, however, is not about magic, and it’s certainly not about the power of kings. A king would deal in gold and silver and jewels, in all the trappings of majesty, NOT in simple barley loaves and fish. A magician, like a genie, might grant you three wishes or help you to win the lottery, but a magician would have no interest in feeding you. Bread is simply not the stuff of power or magic.  It is the stuff of Jesus and of everyday life.

Both in the way he represents his own body as bread and in the way he feeds bread to the multitude, Jesus tells us that he is part of our everyday world. He is with us and within us.  It’s not magic…it’s just love. And like life, love is an everyday miracle that we tend to take for granted.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Amen.

A Meditation on Fear and Faith

Homily for Sunday, June 24, 2012     Buck Mountain and Graves Chapel

Lessons:

1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11,19-23) 32-49

Psalm 9: 9-20

2 Corinthians 6: 1-13

Mark 4: 35-41

The Charlie Brown Christmas special, which has been airing every December since I was a child, features those famous Peanuts cartoon children, creations of the late Charles Schultz. Of course, we come to realize as we grow older that Charlie Brown and his fellow inhabitants of the Peanuts world are really more like miniature adults than real children. In the half-hour Christmas special, Lucy van Pelt convinces Charlie Brown that he needs some advice from his psychiatrist—that would be herself. She charges a nickel for her services and then pelts dear Charlie with questions about the things he fears.  Finally, she asks him, “Do you think you have pantophobia?”  Charlie asks, “What’s pantophobia?” and Lucy replies, “The fear of everything.”  Charlie Brown doesn’t hesitate a second before  replying, “That’s it.!”  Dear Charles Schultz really understood the human condition pretty well.

Fear.  It is almost always with us, and since fear concerns the future, what may be, it keeps us from being fully present in the current moment, where life is, almost all of the time, pretty wonderful. The future we tend to inhabit in fear is not a real place. God can’t be found there. When we are lost in our fears, we isolate ourselves from God. Even when the present time we are experiencing is painful or difficult, staying focused on what we need to do to get through it and turning to God in prayer will always have a better outcome than letting ourselves succumb to fear and push God aside.

Anxiety. Worry. Sorrow. Anger. Fear can be at the root of all these feelings. If I’m anxious about a task I’ve been given, it’s probably because I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it—I may fear I lack the time or the skills to complete the job satisfactorily.  If I’m worried about a loved one who is late in arriving home, I may fear he has been in an accident.  Sadness can be the result of fearing there is no hope, that what I’m experiencing now cannot get better. Even the bluster of anger can disguise the fear beneath it—a parent may react with a burst of anger at a child who could have hurt herself doing something foolish or dangerous.  Fear compels. Fear also fascinates.

Picture this: You are a teenager, put in charge of your younger siblings and cousins at a family gathering. In a game of hide and seek or tag, you are IT, and you stalk your prey. When you come upon a gaggle of the little tykes, you shout “Boo!” They squeal in an instant of genuine terror, run off in all directions, but then scamper back to you, giggling and eager for more. We seem to learn as children that fear can be fascinating fun. Our relationship with fear is a complicated one.

We love scary stories and scary movies, even though a simple reminder of one, say hearing a few seconds of the Jaws theme song, can send our hearts racing.  I wonder if our childhood games are descended from the training primitive parents gave their children in how to hunt (or evade) the very dangerous beasts that inhabited their world. Prehistoric people lived in a world fraught with immediate danger—surviving from one day to the next was their sole preoccupation.  Fear and the adrenaline-charged responses to it were lifesaving.

So does human prehistory explain why fear is still so much a part of our lives? For most 21^st century Americans, at least for those of us here today, simply surviving from day to day is not a challenge. We sleep in comfortable homes, trust that our cars will start when we plan to drive somewhere, have access to decent health care when we need it, and don’t live anywhere near saber-toothed tigers. Yet, we often persist in letting fear compel our thoughts and motivate our actions. Christ may very well say to us, as he said to the disciples in the midst of the storm, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”  Christ entered history 2000 years ago to offer an alternative to life-usurping fear.  

“Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”  Today’s lesson from Mark is one of those gospel moments when I can’t help but feel a little sorry for the disciples who awaken Jesus to hear those words. Storm-tossed at sea in a small wooden boat, they seem justified in their fear. But the key word Jesus speaks is “still.” They know Jesus, they have seen him perform miracles, and he thinks they should know by now that He can be trusted to save them.  As to the rest of us Christians, fear comes easily to the disciples when they forget the essential message of our faith. We no longer need to fear death.

So why does David get it right? Why is the boy David not afraid of Goliath? Is courage the opposite of fear?  To Saul and to David’s brothers (and probably to every other onlooker) David’s going out to meet the giant Goliath in battle must have appeared more foolhardy than courageous.  This is the people’s first introduction to David, who will go on to become Israel’s greatest (and most beloved) king.  Over the course of his long life, David makes some terrible mistakes, but his confrontation with Goliath is not one of them. He may look like a simple boy with a slingshot, but he is well-armed. The source of his courage is his faith, and it is faith that is the opposite of fear.  After the ugly giant taunts and curses him, David responds, “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head.”  David depends on the Lord for his victory over certain death, and his faith is rewarded. It is that kind of trusting faith Jesus wanted from his disciples in the storm- tossed boat.

Paul says to the Corinthians, “I speak as to children—open wide your hearts also.”  In these brief words, I believe Paul is alluding to the aspect of child-nature that makes faith easy for the young. Children are very trusting, and that willingness to be vulnerable may be why Christ said, “I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” In today’s world, we wish children were not so trusting, and parents and grandparents hover nearby, teaching them not to speak to strangers. We wish fear could always be just part of a game for our children. Remember how  children return to play so easily even after they have been terrified by IT?  They are able to put aside their fear because they trust that the grown-ups in their lives will always be there to protect them. The Lord wants all of us, like children, to believe in him with complete trust, to embrace him like a sister or a mother, a brother or a father, and not avoid him like a stranger when we are afraid.

We defeat fear with faith. We can also overcome fear with love.

Like a modern-day soldier, it is not only David’s love of God that sends him into battle with Goliath.  He also loves his country, his people, and his family.  I bet we all have personal stories of someone we know who stood strong in a fearful situation because of love.  Our best example of the connection between love and faith is Jesus Christ himself. Knowing the gruesome cross was coming, he persisted in following faithfully the path before him so that he could give his life for us. As we say, there is no greater love than this.

If the fear of death is our most basic and underlying fear, then we have not fully accepted the self-sacrifice of Jesus as a price he paid so that we might have life eternal. Like the disciples in the boat, we still become fearful for our lives in every storm. Jesus’s words are intended for us: “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

He invites us to let go of our fear and let him protect us.  Amen.