What are you hungry for?

What are you hungry for?

What is it that you truly hunger for, what you are looking for to feel fulfilled in life? I spent some time this week listening to people’s hungers; they would go on about their latest triathlon results or the shopping trips and the atrocious prices of back to school supplies.  There were people wondering how safe their neighborhood was and wanted more than anything to know what was going on.  I wish they would tell me, one lady said, that there was a meth lab shut down in the house down the street.

 I heard kids not being allowed to say what they hungered for; they were bombarded with all kinds of ideas for what they wanted painted on their cheeks.  Some would accept the suggestions, others would have their own ideas that they would finally mention in a whisper.  Some knew what they wanted as soon as they sat down, others took a long time to even get up the courage to come sit near the goofy looking clown with the silly outfit.  Then there were the unspoken wishes that I could only guess at.  Who knows out of the number of kids I met which ones were living in abusive houses where addiction or violence is a regular part of life, as normal as the wallpaper in the living room.  Who knows how many are not getting enough food to eat, or enough love to grow healthy hearts, minds and souls.  The reality is that I met and chatted with at least one child who has lived with so much trauma that he or she is already suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then there are my friends and family and connections.  I asked one young adult, and she said, “I am hungry for restored faith in the base goodness of people.”  Wow.

One fellow said that there are five major issues that people are hungry for, and most people hunger for one or two of the following:

They feel abandoned and hunger for home

They feel betrayed and are fighting for justice

They feel helpless, like an outcast and crave belonging

They feel guilty or ashamed and wish for forgiveness

They feel controlled by a cruel world and long for connection.

What do you feel when you think about your place in the world? Do you feel abandoned? Betrayed? Helpless? Guilty? Controlled?  Do you feel some combination of those?  Do you long for home, or justice, or belonging, or forgiveness, or connection?

Jesus says, regardless of what you hunger for, I am the answer.  I have come so that you might have a fulfilled and rich life.  I have come that no matter what unfairness you have struggled with, what terrible deeds you have committed, or how the world has treated you, you will be fed.

What a bold statement!  So bold that his followers find it too weird to accept.  How can this Jesus say such crazy things?  Many leave, rather than accept his invitation. 

They might be leaving because they think he’s preaching cannibalism, or because he’s insulting the Law that says to not eat meat with blood in it.  They might be leaving because they don’t understand that he is being metaphorical and poetic in this teaching.

Or maybe they can’t handle the basic idea at the root of the scandal of Jesus’ teaching.  God has come down into the world with its nitty gritty, painful dirty life.  God is living through Jesus, the word made flesh, which means that God can interact with us in the daily tasks and challenges.  For those who are used to God as a great ‘theoretical concept’, this is a terribly upsetting idea. 

The followers that leave can’t stomach the scandal of such a repulsive idea, and when we take the bread and dip it in the cup, we shouldn’t take this for granted.  It was weird back when John wrote about it, and it is weird now.  Jesus says, “Does this difficult teaching offend you?" A better translation might be, “does this offensive teaching scandalize you?”

It still does.  We look around at the world and wonder why on earth God would want to have anything to do with such a pack of lying, betraying, broken, lonely and helpless bunch of creatures.  But the story of God we have received down the years points to exactly that.  God provides a covenant of hope with the people, God provides mana in the wilderness, God accompanies them into exile when they thought God was all about place.

God pushes the idea of community when they feel most impotent under the rule of the Romans.  Does this scandalize you?  Does it scare you that God may still be here?

Jesus calls us to believe just that, and I find it comforting to know that his word for believe means to have confidence in, or to trust in.  Trust in, dare to trust that in the simple act of eating bread, God is in your life in the midst of the chaos and the fear.  Practise trust, pretend you trust, experiment trusting in that crazy idea. 

Put on your safety gear of truth, integrity, courageous peace, faith, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray constantly for yourself, your friends and neighbors, and everyone here who gathers together. Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, and that I may declare it boldly.  Pray that we, as a community continue to look for the hidden promise that we can all, regardless of what we hunger for, find the hope and the healing that comes in God’s time to every one of us.  Thanks be to God for the mystery of the gospel message of Jesus, the word made flesh.  Amen!

Open Wide your hearts!

I'm a little behind in posting sermons, but here's one from before my summer holidays.  May it be a hopeful inspiration to all who read it.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hold a three week old.  As the baby got passed around from one auntie or grandma to the next, I was impressed to see the men also take turns.  Uncles, boyfriends, grandpas held this little baby with wide open hearts, and it was a joy to watch.  I hadn’t seen the baby’s dad since he had run away from home at 16, all surly and angry at the world and his parents.  But there he was, also with a wide open heart, smiling and at peace with himself.  I could tell that he wanted to be in his baby boy’s life for the long haul, messy diapers, skinned knees and all.  He had made the transformation to being a father that had a wide open heart for his boy.

This transition is not easy for people, and men in specific.  They are supposed to be as tough as Paul, enduring tragedies and suffering without comment, being the strong silent cowboy that rides off into the sunset.  Not exactly a wide open heart in that imagery.  Nor does it transform the people around them or make the world a better place.  The lone cowboy is one who solves his problems with a gun, and knows that because he is truthful, his six-shooter will make justice come true.  Unfortunately, we know that all too often that is a lie.  A police officer gets shot while trying to deal with a racist man.  A congregation loses 9 members in a prayer service, and so on.  Where do we find ways to help men have open hearts without being ridiculed for appearing weak?

I think that we can look at our gospel story for clues.  Jesus has been telling stories to his friends and followers.  The fishermen let him use their boat as a podium.  These are rough and tumble guys used to living hard lives.  It was so rough that If you ever get a chance to go to Israel, you will find a boat discovered in 1986 that dates back to the time of Jesus.  It’s 27 feet long and patched with 10 kinds of wood to keep it afloat.  These were desperate times for the men, with the Romans moving in and overfishing. 

Taxes meant that it was hard to make ends meet, and many men went elsewhere to become indentured servants if they became bankrupt.

 Going across the Sea of Galilee would not have been a big deal for these men, it is only 13 kilometers wide.  But in another sense, it would have been a very big deal.  On the other side was where there were Gentiles, those people who were not Jews.  Gentiles would have been Romans, Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, and other foreigners.  Jesus wanted to go teach there?  What a disturbing idea!  Somehow they went along with it and took Jesus across.

There are many similar movements where we are going to the other side in our own day.  The TRC has wrapped up its deliberations, and Dr. Marie Wilson has asked us to accept the historical evidence of the abuses of Residential Schools.  Wab Kinew challenges us to rethink our stereotypes as a way of healing our country.  Theo Fleury dares to speak of the treatment he got at the hands of his hockey coach.

All too often, calls to rethink our ideas and move to the other side, to open our hearts wide, lead to backlashes.  General Tom Lawson spoke about men’s behaviors being part of who they are.  A young man took a gun into a black congregation.  And the Government of Canada is still not interested in finding out what is happening to aboriginal women who have gone missing in Canada. 

Backlashes lead to storms that blow up when we least expect it, storms inside our hearts, storms in the media, storms in our families, storms in our industry or our jobs, storms in our community.  They leave us feeling bewildered, confused, and sometimes even scared.  The disciples are terrified, and are sure that they are going to drown in the attempt to do something new.  Jesus only makes their confusion greater.  They are familiar with the story of Jonah and the whale where a storm comes up because Jonah is going the wrong way. 

God convinces Jonah that he must turn around and go where God wanted.  Maybe the fishermen thought the storm was God’s way of saying, ‘turn around, Jesus, and stick to your own side.” So when Jesus wakes up, he doesn’t say, like Jonah did, “let’s turn the boat around, let’s pray for God to forgive us.  No, he talks to the storm the way they imagine God talked to the waters and wind in the days of creation itself.  Who is this Jesus, who is even greater than Jonah?

The last verse says that ‘they were filled with great awe”, but the Greek is phobon megan, or mega phobia!  Discovering that we are being called to do hard work is scary.  Some never manage it, like the shooter in South Carolina.  We are called to re-examine our racist assumptions, our skewed sense of history, and even our national identity by the TRC.

Dr. Wilson said that it’s not by feeling shame or guilt or trying to fix each other that we will change Canadian History, it’s by how we treat each other, day to day even when we are terrified.  We can become honorable and loving fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and neighbors dedicated to supporting all the children of Canada.  We can be become a country where racism and cultural genocide is a thing of the past.  We can call for a place where education and healthcare is funded equally for all.  And we can learn to see Jesus in the boat beside us, opening our hearts wide, smoothing our waters and calming our storm.  May it be so for us all.