Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
August 13, 2006, The Tenth Sunday of Pentecost: Year B
by The Reverend William A. Greenlaw, Ph.D.
Deuteronomy 8: 1 - 10
Psalm 34
Ephesians 4: 25 - 5: 2
John 6: 37 - 51

            I have to be honest with you.  I have been dreading this day—when, returning from vacation it would be my turn once again to get into this pulpit and attempt to proclaim the Word of God to those of you gathered here this morning.

            The reason for this is simplicity itself, yet nonetheless, it is very real.  I wish this were one of those fairly lazy, quiet, Augusts we used to experience here.  Where we could celebrate an easier, more relaxed pace, where most everyone in at least some fashion is able to take some time of for some well-deserved R&R. Where we could deal briefly with one or two of the range of possibilities our lessons suggest this morning—maybe even dealing with questions of the “inner” rather than the “outer.”  Where we might even escape the craziness of the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church for at least a week or two.

           But I am haunted today by images of villagers and simple folk in Lebanon who were not consulted and had no voice over what has befallen them over the last month plus—who have seen a small country practically destroyed in a spasm of violence that seems to know no bounds.  Just as the war in Iraq makes a mockery of any sense of a “just war,” and makes a mockery of their being at least some sense of proportionality in the prosecution of the war, so we have a similar situation in Lebanon.

            I don’t want for one moment want to condone the methods and ideology of Hezbollah, and I despair over what seems the hopelessness of any just and lasting peace in that tortured area of the Middle East.

            I also despair over the hopelessness of the situation in Iraq as civil war is clearly a present reality—but where we cannot seem to disengage because we hang on to the myths and errors and, yes, lies, that got us into this quagmire in the first place.  And so, the killing and destruction goes on and on and on and on, world without end.

            In just one more instance of the immorality of our own government, we do not move to impose a ceasefire in Lebanon because we want to give Israel more time to accomplish its mission—even as Israel discovers its mission is ever more complicated and intractable.   I was made sick to read of the urgent resupply by the United States to Israel of the most deadly cluster antipersonnel bombs—designed to inflict maximum casualties and maximum damages during the “window” the United States was keeping open for Israel.

            The problem is simply that overwhelming force may be able to kill and destroy—but it cannot impose a lasting, much less a just peace in and of itself.  It most often only begets more violence and hatred and death—in a seemingly endless and vicious cycle.

            This week we also saw the specter of unimaginable violence in the friendly skies over the Atlantic.  And we act with horror and a sense of helplessness and despair.  I fear we have not really dealt with the reasons why so many Muslims find their way into such extreme hatred of not only the United States but also of Western Europe—and why so many hate not only our arrogance but also the very democratic and open and free society and culture that matters so much to us right here.  This last is the really scary part.

            I had a conversation with Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of CBST last week, where she spoke of the conference and demonstrations that had been planned for gay rights in Jerusalem this month.  The war scuttled most but not all of what was planned. 

            But it was with bitter irony that Sharon related that the one thing, the seeming only thing that could bring Muslims, Jews, and Christians together in Jerusalem right now was resisting anything concerned with gay rights.

            The world seems like such a nasty, polarized place is so many ways.  And there is no easy, no imaginable “solution” anywhere in sight.

            And then there is global warming.  I know it was hotter than blazes here—but it was also extraordinarily hot in the three and a half weeks Jane and I were in Switzerland, France, and Italy.  And I need to tell you that we often had to field the same sort of question we experienced during last presidential campaign two years ago, except then it was about the war in Iraq.  Mild-mannered, seemingly non-political people would say in half-bewilderment, half-anger, “what is it with your president?”  “You have got to address the environment.”  Their growing despair and outrage and sense of helplessness was palpable.

            Put all these things together, and I feel positively limp and uncertain and deflated.  For these issues are real and present and dangerous.  And they do and will affect us all, whether or not we were consulted, whether we like it or not.  And although Americans have been very good at hiding, very good at denying that which is uncomfortable, the jig seems increasingly up.

            When I feel so overwhelmed as I do from all these things, it is sometimes far from clear, just how the “Good News” is to be proclaimed—and that is why I have dreaded this day.  I have had to struggle and agonize to get beyond this—but of course I did finally get a few clues when I was finally able to stop and open myself to a deeper level of discernment.

            Preeminent among those clues was the joy experienced in coming back to this wonderful community.   Where for days now, in the terrible heat, the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen has been often serving 1300 meals, with everyone in remarkably good humor. 

            Where a wonderful group of folks lead by Oscar Mandes managed the street fair yesterday and seemed to be having a great time doing it, all to the benefit of All Saints Church, New Orleans in the light of their Katrina damage.

            Where in the continuing saga of the aftermath of our General Convention, there is energy and commitment and many participants in the new group “Wake Up,” meeting here every Wednesday night.  Where the Episcopal New Yorker finally appeared this week with the full page ad in it from our vestry asking for “leadership and clarity” from our bishops.  It is too early to know what the full effect of this will be, but there will be an effect, and I want to tell you how proud I am of our wardens and vestry, of all our clergy, and of all of you for standing, unambiguously, for a truly inclusive church.  And I give thanks that in our Episcopal Church, we have the freedom even to take on our bishops as openly and as directly as we have—even as they are still very much our bishops.

            And so, maybe, although things are pretty grim all over, life still goes on, at times life even abounds, the spirit is here, life is here.  And we have the possibility of being renewed and restored even so.  We might even have the possibility of discovering once again just how blessed we have been.  And that important as the global and social and historical are, the personal and individual is where it all starts with the God who loves us even so.

            In our gospel for today we have these words:  “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away…  This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up at the last day…  I am the bread of life.”

            Isn’t this what life is ultimately about?  Being in relationship.  Being held in love by the One who can hold us through everything life and even death can throw at us?  Sensing that at the very heart of the world in which we live is finally not despair, destruction, and death, but rather life eternal?

            But to find this love and hope and possibility, we need to depend on the grace and generosity of God—a God who asks for surrender and vulnerability and receptivity much more than control and power and force of will.  In our world, that is a tall order—it certainly doesn’t sound very American.

            Moses put it to the people who had wandered in the wilderness this way:  “the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper.  You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord you God for the good land that he has given you.”

            There’s only one problem here.  It’s in the last clause, in blessing the Lord for the good land he has given.  It’s in keeping the commandments of the Lord.  The ancient Israelites and all who have come after right to the present would rather do it their way.  And then to count whatever success may happen  to their own virtue rather than to divine providence.  If this was true for ancient Israel, it is also true for the modern state of Israel, and God help us, the United States of America.  It is also true for us as individuals as well.  We need to find our way back.

            The church at Ephesus needed to be told to “put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”  Sometimes we need to hear those words applying to us as well, even here.  Perhaps especially here as we take on so very strenuously those who differ with us—a tall order.

             As I scratched around this week for a final word to leave with each of you—and also most assuredly with myself, I came across a saying by Henri Nouwen which I think does speak to the disorientation, the dislocation so many of us have been feeling.

             Nouwen’s word was simply this: “one way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.”  We are sealed in the Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.  And yet in our disorientation and dislocation, it is so easy to forget who we are, whose we are, where we belong, where our true home is.

             The only way really to deal with our disorientation and dislocation is to create a time and place for God.  To find our way back to that heavenly banquet where we are offered a prefiguration of that divine life which is our hope and our promise.  And where we can find not an escape, but rather to find ourselves transformed—seeking to incarnate that love in this broken and fragile world that God loves and has redeemed.

              “Taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are they who trust in him!”   Amen.

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