Moving Too Quickly to Reach Here -- Pentecost X--Year B--August 9, 2009 -- The Reverend David R. Williams

Living host, call us together, call us to eat and drink with you.  Grant that by your body and your blood we may be drawn to each other and to you.  Amen.

“Could I go into the church?” the visitor says as she comes by the office this past week.  “I would like to spend a little time there.  It’s been a while since I have been here.”

I offer to take this lady who introduces herself as Carole into the sanctuary. 

After I turn on the lights, Carole quietly sits in the front pew.  “I’ll be in the office if you need any assistance,” I say.  “Please feel free to take your time here.”

Instead of taking me up on the offer for solitude, Carole says, “I have a question.  Where is this church with all the issues going on today--women’s ordination, sexuality--you know, all those things we read and hear about?”

Carole then tells me she was raised in this church and had not been back for thirty-some years.  The Reverend Gene Bollinger was the Rector during most of her childhood years at Holy Comforter. 

“Back then,” she reminisces, “we were free to think for ourselves – to live with the gray areas and not have liberals on one side or conservatives on the other side trying to tell me what to think or what to believe. That was important to me back then. Today, it seems you have to be in one camp or another.”

“The Church is important….too important.”

Now a resident of Reston, Virginia, Carole says she has tried to go to the Episcopal Church there.  “The Episcopalians were worshiping in a Baptist church for a while before building their own church,” she says. “We also tried going to another Episcopal Church in Northern Virginia for a while.”

Whatever Carole and her Presbyterian husband were seeking in a church, they did not find it. The couple has not been active for a long time in any parish.

Trying to reassure her, I say that Holy Comforter seems to have a wide variety of thinking, praying folks – people able to disagree, yet respect each other and care for each other. 

“That is the way I remember it here,” Carole thoughtfully says.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says to the disciples.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

How many Caroles are here among us, coming to worship each Sunday – hungry, thirsty, lonely, uncertain, skeptical, or searching? 

The message from Jesus is clear. “I am the bread of life.”

Carole’s musings are interesting to me. Thirty years!  What has happened over that span of time?  What have I, David, missed from the church of my childhood?  What has changed, really, in the Episcopal Church? The church that I knew-St. Matthews--was like the Holy Comforter that I now love: a respectful, accepting church. People seemed to be quite friendly, no one tried to tell anyone how to live or think. Is St. Matthews still the same kind of place that I experienced?  Am I the same person?

“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I have died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”? King David cries. 

David, too, looks back.  His eldest son, killed in battle, was precious to David, part of his very being. What has David missed?  What went wrong?  David mourns, he cries out for better understanding. 

Absalom’s battle was not with the nation.  Absalom’s battle was with his dad, King David.  Absalom was obsessed with his own hunger for vindication.  David fears the worst as he realizes that Absalom has not survived the battle. 

The immense and deeply-felt hungers within David and Absalom, within Carole and surely each of us to different degrees lives in us as we come to the church for solace and worship, for inspiration and understanding.

“Our hungers are so deep,” Duke University theologian William Willimon says.  “We are dying of thirst. We are bundles of seemingly insatiable need, rushing here and there in a vain attempt to assuage our emptiness.  Our culture is a vast supermarket of desire.  Can it be that many of our desires are, in the eternal scheme of things, pointless?”

“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!”

At the foot of a great mountain in China live a father and his three sons.  They are a simple and loving family.  The father notices that travelers come from afar, eager to climb the dangerous mountain.  But not one of the travelers ever returns.  The three sons hear stories about the mountain, how it is made of gold and silver at the top.

The father’s three sons cannot resist.  They embark on the journey up the mountain.  Along the way, under a tree sits a beggar, but the sons do not speak to him or give him anything.  The sons ignore the beggar.

One by one, the sons disappear up the mountain, the first to a house of rich food, the second to a house of fine wine, the third to a house of political power.  Each becomes a slave to his own desire and they forget their home. 

Meanwhile, the father becomes heartsick.  He misses them terribly.  “Danger aside,” he thinks, “I must find my sons.”

Once he scales the mountain, the father finds that indeed the rocks are gold; the streams are filled with silver.  But he hardly notices.  On the way back down the mountain after failing to find his sons, the father notices the beggar under the tree and asks for his advice. 

“The mountain will give your sons back,” says the beggar, “only if you bring something from home to cause them to remember the love of their family.”

The father races home and returns with a bowl full of rice, giving a portion of the rice to the beggar in gratitude for his wisdom.  He then finds his sons, one at a time, and carefully places a spoonful of rice on the tongue of each son.  At that moment, the sons recognize their foolhardiness.  Their real life is now apparent to them.  They return home with their father.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

What mountains have we climbed over the years?  What mountain beckoned David and his son Absalom?  What mountain has Carole journeyed?  Today we gather in this church to receive a reminder of home, a taste of the sustenance that first and last nourishes us.

“Might it be true that Jesus, the Christ is the bread we need, even though he is rarely the bread we seek?” William Willimon asks us.

“Carole,” I say to my new friend, “Find a church, a congregation in Northern Virginia.   Believe me, whatever congregation you discover will be all the more rich for your perspective on the faith. The challenge for all of us can be how to live with the gray areas, the texture of God’s grace.”

In the beginning and in the end, true grace will be found if only we hold out our palms, in faith, to that simple bread given so freely at the altar of our Lord.  “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Amen.