Sunday Sermon, Aug 19, 2012 Proper 15, Pentecost 12

Russell Rathburn, a local pastor here in Minneapolis, asked an interesting question in his weekly column called “The Hardest Question”. Rathburn asks, “Is John’s Jesus telling us that we should become God? In the Eucharist do we rehearse the consuming of Jesus’ life, binding his soul to ours making us like God? Which begs an even harder question: what is God like?”

We don’t really know what God is like, and we don’t even really know if God wants us to be more like God. But these are important questions for us to consider as we walk along the path we are on. These are important questions that can help us understand more fully what it is God is calling us to do and to be. There are indeed clues that help us understand the questions, never the answers unfortunately, but always the questions more clearly, and one clue that I love to the think about is the idea of the incarnation.

The incarnation has been on my mind a lot as I have read these scriptures, the idea that God put on human flesh and became like us in order to be with us, to be among us. Emmanuel means, God with us, God among us. There is a sense that God IS among us, but we just can’t quite see where God is, we always have to ask, we have to explore and dig to find out where God is present, and we always find God in the most unexpected of places.

I have a plaque on the wall of my office that states, “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.” Which for me is a wonderful way to think about the incarnation. None of us, none of our ancestors, no one influenced God to come down among us and become human. No one that we can lay any sort of relationship claim to convinced God that God needed to walk among us.

God chose to come among us, God chose to put on the limitations of human flesh, the harsh and real pain that humans experience in heartbreak, in betrayal, in all those difficult life experiences. God chose also to experience the great joy of love, the great joy of relationship that we humans feel as well. Just as we choose to consume Jesus’ life into our own, just as we eat the bread and drink the wine soon to be before us, we choose to be with God in all that God is doing among us.

It is remarkable to think about this idea of the incarnation, and it is something we do every Sunday, or every time we consume the bread and the wine of Eucharist. We put on flesh, we put on human experience and we ignite the divine spark within us that calls us to goodness, to holiness, to divinity. In the consumption that happens at the Eucharistic experience each Sunday we choose to be transformed and we choose to align our spirits, our bodies and our minds with God.

For many, the putting on of human flesh in the incarnation is something that is not so remarkable. Many people I hang around with, when you start to talk about human nature and humanity in general believe through and through that we are horrible people by nature. That we are such sinful people and such limited people that we are not worthy to be loved.  And with all the shootings lately, that is not a hard conclusion to come to.

I believe that much of that kind of theology leads us down paths that convince us we are not worthy and that we cannot be loved. Judgment and blame is about power, claiming our ability condemn, to determine who can be loved and who cannot be loved, who is worthy and who is not worthy. When we begin to walk a path of judgment, we find that our own path of righteousness becomes self centered and filled with fear. It is easier, after all, to notice the speck in someone else’s eye than to see the log in our own.

When I first arrived here at Gethsemane I took a class on missiology and was chastised when I said our job, as Christians, as I think Paul is saying in today’s reading from Ephesians, our job is to sing from the rooftops, the mountain ranges, everywhere we can sing from about the Glory of God. That is our call as Christians. I was told, literally told that we need to instill more somberness in our people, that we need to instill more awareness of our sinfulness, that singing and proclaiming won’t help the Church, understanding our limited sinful nature will be what transforms the Church.

Well excuuuuuse me. Never before had I heard someone equate church growth with sinfulness. I dropped the class shortly thereafter, not because I didn’t like it, but rather because it was about the same time that Eliot was diagnosed with Leukemia, and the person that chastised me was bordering on the idea that his sinfulness was what brought on his Leukemia, because a two year old can be such a sinful person as to deserve a life threatening illness.

But I digress, I have preached from this place, as you well know, that I believe humans, by nature, are good. That God created us, not to be sinful creatures, but rather to be good and amazing beings, people who can land a rover on Mars; we are people who can overcome great obstacles and impossibilities that change the world. I believe through and through that we are made in God’s image and God’s image is nothing but good.

The idea of the incarnation is something that supports this for me, that God would put on human flesh and walk among us doesn’t place some kind of gap between the Holy One and us, rather it utterly and completely destroys that gap, it utterly and completely erases that gap. The incarnation does not make God small, it makes all of humanity enormous with possibility, pregnant with joy. The whole world is filled to its fullest with the presence of God, with the love of God, with the holiness and divinity that God used to create all of us in the image of God. In the Eucharist we are asked not only to be filled, but to be changed into something holy and human.

So, when Jesus says, you have to eat me, in order to have life, what is it that Jesus is saying? There are all sorts of actual historical and archeological and scientific, sociological understandings I could throw at you here, but I think it I comes down to this idea of the human family, our human interconnectedness, how each of us, every single human being on the earth, including those who have gone before as well as those who will yet come, all of us are intricately and vitally connected to one another.

And that is what Jesus is saying, that we must, as part of consuming the bread and the wine that we recognize as the Eucharistic feast, we must recognize the holy in all people. Our rose colored glasses must be removed and replaced with the glasses that show us the possibility and the reality of the divinity in each person we meet no matter their faith, creed, color or belief. In participating in this Eucharistic feast, we are working to tear down the boundaries we have placed in our worlds, we are called to understand truly what it means to be loved and what being filled to the fullest by the Spirit truly means.

God made us all, and God made us in God’s own image, and God was very much pleased with what God created. Indeed, God said that we were good. Putting on human flesh that was identified and blessed and set aside as sacred is something vitally important to our understanding of the community.

The people from MCTC who have grown tended the garden outside, as well as the people who have plots, they are all a part of our life as a community of faith. The people we feed every Wednesday at the Shelf of Hope, each person that has ever come into the Church to receive food has become a part of our human family, brothers and sisters, daughter and sons. Each one of those people is part of who we are as a community of faith, because we have shared with them the joy of this Eucharistic feast.

It is our task, as people, filled to the brim with the Spirit, to incorporate all those who are or are not connected to Gethsemane into our lives, not just feed them. We must learn from the stories that are being created, not just tell them. It is our job, our call to walk hand in hand with all the people who have impacted this place and sing about the Goodness of God and the glory of all creation wherever we can.