Another Way to See - Pentecost XVII - Sunday, September 27, 2009 - Ms. Kathy Hykes

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, oh Lord our strength and our redeemer.”

My husband Bob and I drove to the Greensboro farmers market last Saturday hoping to find some of the last peaches of summer. We were successful in our quest, but we did not stop there, what with so many temptations, we continued filling our bags at different stalls with fresh produce; two apples, two zucchini, two potatoes, two tomatoes, some shrimp, some pansies and a bunch of zinnias, until we were weighted down with our purchases and our cash almost gone. Bob got a cup of freshly ground coffee and I looked around for a nice cup of iced tea for the ride home. It was a splendid day, with the rain just stopped after several days, and we were looking forward to entertaining and visiting with friends that evening.

Now, months ago, I had decided that the sermon I would preach today would be about the Theology of Food, which is our topic in Adult Sunday School this fall, and part of my reason for going to the market was to get myself primed for talking about the simplicity of carefully choosing fresh vegetables proffered by the outstretched hands of the farmer who grew them. I wanted to remind myself of the effort that goes into bringing it to the table, and the mindfulness we sometimes fail to bring to this daily and life giving ritual. I also planned to talk about the work of the committee on the Millennium Development Goals, and our October 11^th hunger awareness banquet to raise money for the Heifer project to buy chickens for families around the world so that they might become self-sustainable and pass that on to their neighbors. I was also going to tell you how we are trying to provide a comprehensive educational program through a parish wide discussion of food while we raise money for those who suffer from hunger. I am going to ignore all that for now and following the lead of the Gospel writer Mark, just go with my story.

As we started to leave the farmers market building, a woman behind a counter smiled at me.  It was an unusually bright and beautiful smile and a moment later I noticed that she had tea for sale. I asked her for some and while she prepared it, I mentioned what a lovely smile she had, that it had stopped me. She replied, “ It is a God smile”.  “A What?” I asked? I thought I did not hear her properly because I was still in the midst of my little middle class fantasy—spending way more on this amount of food than I would have paid in the Food Lion store, and feeling kind of smug about it.  “A God smile”, she repeated. Without hesitation, as though she had been waiting for me all morning, she launched into her life history, which was a rapid, dispassionate summation of some of the worst sorrows we can imagine in one life, a son’s suicide, a daughter’s death in childbirth, loss of jobs and income, a beloved mother’s lingering illness, and a husband who abandoned all of them, were the ones I remember. Before I could ask, “then why are you smiling?” she said that a man with vision had told her that if she prayed, and relied on God, she would be ok, she would be able to smile. I smiled back, self-consciously, you know how it is when someone spills their private story to you and professes their faith and it comes out of nowhere, and you don’t know what to say. Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me fairly often, with complete strangers, so that I have practiced how to recover quickly. I found the presence of mind to say, “Well, it sure is good that you have that faith, after all that has happened to you”.  She finished fixing my tea and we said good-bye.

Now there is more than one way to look at that story. On the one hand, the jaded consumer in me said, she just used that smile to capture you for the sale. The armchair psychologist says, this woman has some issues!  She lacks boundaries. The practical side of me wonders how much money she can make in a day selling tea and will it be enough to tide her over. The realist says she tells that story to every person who buys her tea or her vegetables and you should not think that you are her only confidant today. The cynic wondered how much of her story was true. The Episcopalian me asks if she has a church family, a circle of support for her sorrow, a circle of care for her times of real joy. Maybe a church is where the visionary man she quoted came from. Since she had nothing to gain and did not use any of this to her advantage, I was left feeling worried for her, sorry that life had dealt her so much pain and appalled once again at the woes and suffering of the world. I marveled that she could still smile, that she had not succumbed to despair during the more hellish times of her life. But finally after giving the whole event a lot of thought because it stayed on my mind, I realized that that woman was the first person that made me look at the whole morning of transactions from the other side. She needed more from me than simply buying her tea. She needed me to see her, to have some empathy, to be aware of her side of this story. This was not just about buying her food, this was also about feeding our souls. It brought me up short. It changed the way I looked at the events of my morning.

“Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

That is the line from the Gospel of Mark that got my attention, each time I read the passage; “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

Even the commentator writers do not know the origin or implications of this phrase of Jesus’.  We only know that salt was used for preservation and for taste and that sometimes the salt was mixed with impurities.

We do know that this Gospel passage is a continuation of Jesus’ call to discipleship and what it can cost. John the disciple expected to be praised for trying to stop others from casting out demons but instead he and the others got a scolding, a lecture.  Jesus suggested that they use a different way of looking at the events of the day. Jesus is on the journey to Jerusalem, so he is teaching as much as he can to these disciples who don’t understand what kind of kingdom they are being called to fulfill. He brings them up short.

What is the quality of our discipleship? Is following Christ at the core of our being? Salt in the water changes the taste of the whole pot. How thoroughly does the salt of discipleship run through us?

I got an email this past week from Food for the Poor. Accompanying it was a before and after picture of two young girls, the first one shows them obviously hungry and poverty stricken, and then the second photograph shows them in clean school uniforms with their hair tied up in matching navy blue ribbons. The difference is so striking that you almost cannot believe they are the same children. In fact, I looked carefully at the structure of their faces to be certain this was a true picture of the same girls.  Someone stopped and saw these girls, saw their hunger, and fed them. And truly they are not the same children, since now they are fed, and clothed and going to school. I was not the one to look them in the eye, to see them, and try to help, but someone else did and they in turn, invite me and you to help them.

So this is all we really have. We have our ways of being good disciples. At the core of us, we meet the needs of the world the best we can, we feed each other, and hopefully we try, each one of us to feed the hungry both in our community and in parts of the world we cannot see, to solve the problem of hunger, to somehow recognize in the emaciated faces of the hungry--- pretty girls with ribbons in their hair, to know that if we use our will, they can succeed, they will thrive, but only with our help, with our attention.

It is not easy to look at the videos on- line of hungry children. They will move you to tears. But it is not until the salt rises in us, until the true north of compassion translates into some kind of action that we become the disciples we are called to be. It is not until we hand over “the cup of water to drink”, raise or save our money for a flock of chickens, walk in the C.R.O.P. walk, take the food off the Loaves and Fishes truck or put some on, dish out food at Good Shepherd Kitchen or serve the overnight guests at the Homeless Shelter that the joy of meeting life at a point of need kicks in. That is what we do around here at the Church of the Holy Comforter, and we don’t seem to care who gets the credit, but there is so much more to be done.

When we bow our heads to recite the Lord’s Prayer during the Eucharist this morning, we are asking that every person alive share in a daily ration of bread “this day”. We are asking that we eat our own loaves with the recognition of the blessing that they are. Then we can call ourselves disciples. And it will more than likely bring us peace.

Amen.

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.