Religious Abuse

Good Morning!  Grace and Peace to you from God our Creator, and Jesus Christ, our risen Lord.  To start off, I want each of you to look around you.  Just take a quick a look.  What do you see?  Do you see people? Do you see park benches and trees?  Well what we see isn’t the theme of our message today, but rather it is what we don’t see.  It is about the things we miss or skip over, the things that maybe we should be seeing, but in fact are not.

                In going over our gospel lesson for this week I was drawn inevitably back to my own childhood.  The thoughts of preaching in the park today drew me back to playing over at my cousin’s house in Conroe, Texas.  They had a fantastic pool that we would swim for hours in, and I remember fondly the time spent there playing games and eating probably a little too much food.  Every time we went over to my aunt’s house I remember the smiling faces of family, of my aunts and cousins.  Over time, however, I found out what was not there.  As I grew older, as I matured and put aside childish things and grew into the adult I would become I saw those years more clearly.  I discovered what was in the shadows, what lurked unseen as my aunts greeted me with a warm smile and let us play for hours on end with her children. 

                My aunts on my father’s side were Southern Baptist, and indeed, one aunt was actually a Holy Roller and spoke in tongues, but in truth, I never cared about any of that.  Christians were Christians to my young eyes and, yes, it was strange, but if that is what brought her closer to God who was I to get in the middle of that?  However, I found out their reactions to me were never so friendly or accepting.  My Dad you see was raised Baptist, too, but when he married Mom he decided to become Lutheran, and that was something his family never really forgave him for or me as it turned out.  My Dad was an apostate to them and I learned that they personally referred to him often as “Satan” and literally called me his Spawn.  When I went over to their house as a child, all I ever saw were the smiling faces there to greet me, but what I did not see was how those smiles turned to sneers when I was no longer in sight .  But it did not stop there.  Already prone to extremism, I found out in college that my aunts and even one of my cousins would gather together around the Bible and routinely and fervently pray to God for my Father’s death.  I am not joking.  When Dad’s road construction company grew and flourished they feared that if a Lutheran business person was successful it would only lead other people astray and into sin.  They prayed for God to judge my Father and send a message to all those other sinners out there so they would be afraid and return to God’s Word – which by the way they and they alone knew how to properly interpret. 

                There are still some things I don’t know about those times, some things still hidden from sight, but some things I do know.  My cousins, as they began to age, had less and less to do with me.  What was once fast friendship and family slowly eroded to silence.  But worse than this was my Father.  A man I knew who was hard-working and practical, whose determination knew no bounds and was obvious in his love for his boys and his family, over the years I watched him devolve into something heartless.  After years of working with brothers who put on that same fake face, that same false love but stood behind their wives evil intent, he became a man lost in his own anger, who cheated on his wife, threw away his business and his faith , and now is so estranged from his children he tells people that we are dead.  No, no that’s not entirely correct.  He tells strangers that I am dead, my adopted brother whom he raised from infancy he just says was never his.  In all honesty, there are times when I look back at what they did, at what my father became, and I wonder.  In those lonely moments before sleep embraces me, as my rational mind numbs and the shadows begin creeping inexorably into the room, I wonder whether as they fervently prayed for my father’s death if some dark terrible thing didn’t finally hear them and choose to act.

                You see, ladies and gentlemen, we tend to focus on what is seen, and quite frankly to an extent who could blame us?  Digging too deep in the human experience is to uncover things that are not so wholesome, in fact they are often ugly.  To not look beyond the obvious, however, is irresponsible, for God has commanded that we love the world and its people as they really are, not how we willfully choose to view them.  Such needs to be our attitude moving into our gospel lesson for today.

                On the surface, our story might seem that Jesus is making new laws concerning Jewish cleanliness and declaring all food clean.  Indeed, Christian Theologians from Justin Martyr down to Mrs. McGullicutty’s 3^rd Grade Sunday School class often use these stories to talk about moving from the Old Covenant to the New, but such a reading fails to look past appearances and see the betrayal and the outrage inherent in the text.

                Our story tells us that the Pharisees and the Scribes had gathered around Jesus and his disciples who were eating without washing their hands.  While 2000 years later we often paint Jesus’ long time foes as some kind of silent movie villain, the Snydely Whiplashes of a bygone era, the reality is these people were not.  The Pharisees were respected countrymen, a group dedicated to preserving Torah and the Jewish tradition in a conquered land.  And the scribes, they were the Bible publishers of their day, entrusted with providing new and accurate scrolls for the Jewish Community.  These were people that had earned the respect of their fellow Jews, and rightfully so.  To find suddenly what they think of you, to discover the smiles and the fellowship present when you were watching slip away into sneers and derision when you weren’t.  To at long last peek behind the curtain and see the whole story for what it was, the people for whom you honored and had only goodwill, saw you in turn only as unwashed filth.  With up-turned noses they declare the disciples to be apart from Israel, asking in a backhanded manner, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands as the gentiles do?”

                 And at this, Jesus is outraged.  He says to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;  in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as Doctrine.'  You abandon the commandment of God to love your neighbor and hold to human tradition." 

                In response to the Pharisees’ jab towards his disciples, a jab that was for all the world was not about faith but for being a working people who happened to get both hungry and dirty, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of being the very kind of Israelite that Isaiah preached against, a people willing to look holy and devout on the outside but inside were the furthest thing from it.  “So my disciples are terrible for not washing their hands, would you mind telling me what verse that was again?  You who are so knowledgeable of the Bible, please tell us where in Israel’s history did God ever require this of his people?  My disciples hands are full of dirt you say?  Perhaps that might have meant more if it came from someone whose heart wasn’t so full of rot.”

                It is here Jesus brings the crowds into the conversation and what began was a sly snide remark meant for a few is suddenly opened up for all the world to see.  He addresses his audience by saying something that we all thought was new but in reality was very old.  That there were wicked Jews who hid behind the religion of Israel to perform the deeds of their evil hearts was by all accounts not new, the prophet Micah reminded his religious audience that a thousand rams would not slake the Lord’s anger “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good… what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”  Likewise, the prophet Hosea who confronted the priests of Gilead and compared them to marauders, “God desires mercy and acknowledgment of Him rather than burnt offerings and sacrifice.”  What makes a man truly unclean, Jesus declares, has nothing to do with religious observance but the human heart, for out of that do all foul things come.

                I admit, this story hits me hard.  Not only is it because I have lived with Holy Bullies and shadowy headless monsters but I know that as Americans, indeed as a congregation, we know of this reality all too well.  People on street-corners shouting religion like bullets instead of applying gospel like salve, family twisting arms and spirituality so others conform to religion the way they like it, making ceilings and walls out of faith instead of floors that support.  But as disturbed as I am by this story, as terrible and ugly as the religious bullies are it disturbs me more that I can become it.  I can be the bully.  Yes, the same Peter cut by the Pharisees words in Mark was the same Peter in Acts whom God had to rebuke three times to not call Unclean what He has made clean.  This story hits home to all of us because we can see ourselves at every turn. We will live to be the Pharisee, the bigot who looks down on God’s children because they are different and we will use God’s religion as our excuse.  We will live to be victim, the faithful follower of God who will find ourselves in the shooting sites of the rotten.  But despite this, despite all of it I take hope, for though we can and will be the bully and the bullied, we can also be the Christ, the child of God who rises to the defense of his people and calling the evil out of the shadows where it thrives and into the light.

                That we need to learn these roles, that we as a Church must learn that are times we must stand up and be strong, times to sit back and nurse wounds, and even times to look down and be found guilty is self evident.  That we may need to risk taking a shot meant for another, that may need to be humble and let someone defend us who is better at it than we are, that we may need to be sorry even if we cannot see what we have done wrong, these are essential lessons for Christ’s church especially moving into the twenty-first century. 

As I talk around, as I keep in touch with seminary colleagues and even other church-goers, they tell me the same sad story – one of failure and frustration.  We talk and then the conversation turn to me, “Keven, how’s your church doing?” and I find I have an embarrassment of riches.  We’re growing!   adding members and having visitors, we’re helping people both at home and abroad taking care of orphans and mothers in need, we’re performing baptisms and interceding for people through Prayer, and let me tell you this Church has some spiritual oomph.  I’ve been here for over a year and every person I’ve put into that Prayer book has seen positive change.  These things are happening because of who we are.  They look at us, they look at the leadership of this church and the see Luther the priest and musician, Luther the teacher and scholar, and yes, even Luther the spitfire.  They say here is a place where people of vastly different understandings, philosophies, and background, and yet they put it all down to work together.  They look at you and see, here, here is a congregation that doesn’t care where I’m from.  They look at you and see soil to grow in, they look at us and see something else, they see home.  But if we are to continue this, if we are going to continue growing in the next decade we need to learn the lessons of our gospel story and learn them well and accept people for who they are because that is what Jesus did.

  And to do this, I have an actual practical assignment for you.  It isn’t homework, so we can all just calm down a little bit.  I have asked Pastor Don to include the Apostle’s Creed in our worship today, it is one of the earliest creeds of the Christian Church.  Before today you spoke it aloud and saw only what is there.  Today, as you read it, I want you to do the opposite, I want you to speak the words and notice what is not there.  I want you to see what the earliest church saw as important, and for the first time I want you to see what they did not.  In the creed you will see nothing on how you are to read your Bibles, you will find no trace of what to think of evolution or even what to think of other religions.  Indeed, I dare say that every major complaint and rift in the Christian Church over its two thousand year history, every fight that Christians bully each other over daily, you will find our forbears thought were extraneous.  To them all that was needed were the simple truths of God as our Creator Redeemer and Sustainer, for out of that lens of faith will all else be made clear.  It is not that they didn’t believe other matters weren’t important, it’s not that they didn’t disagree –sometimes they did so vehemently.  Rather, however, they believed that any important matters not in the creed would come in their own time as God would provide and it was not worth dividing the body of Christ.  Let us as Christians rejoice over what has united us for centuries and let us not be Pharisees over which people of good conscience may differ.  Amen.               

The True End of Our Religion

Sermon from John 6:24-35

Good Morning!  As someone who has earned both his Master’s of Divinity and his Juris Doctorate, a lot of people ask me what it’s like going from the legal profession to that of Christian ministry.  Well, for one thing I find I can cross running water now, and the ability to cast a reflection really helps when shaving.  People wonder why I have only half a beard… well to be honest it’s the half I still can’t see.

In at least half seriousness though, I sum up what it’s like going from attorney to pastor as my Moses moments and my Rameses moments.  I called being in the legal profession my Rameses moments.  Most people think it’s because the Pharoah was the villain in the Exodus and that we like to think of laywers as villains, but truth be told that isn’t really it.  I call them my Rameses moments because I would be at party, a social gathering, or just waiting in line for a burger and someone would inevitably ask me that terrible question: “So, what do you do for a living?”  And I would answer them like this, “I’ve graduated law school and I am trying to be an attorney.”  And at that point these waves of people looking for free legal advice would come crashing in almost drowning me with thousands of inane selfish questions.  Now, however, I have what I call my Moses moments.  People ask me what I do professionally and I say, “Oh, I’m a preacher,” and it is as if the breath of God goes before me, driving back the seas of people looking to avoid the religious person, and I can walk to my destination unhindered as if on dry ground.  What can I say, it’s handy if there’s a line at McDonalds and I’m in a hurry.

It’s unfortunate, but as any parent of any child knows, offer heavenly advice that pays dividends both in this world and the next and it goes largely ignored, but offer earthly advice for earthly gain and people will mortgage their houses and spend their children’s college money to get their hands on it.  I guess the logic must be that since heavenly advice is given freely it must be worthless.  Such is not only the world that we live in today but it was also the expectation of the crowds in our gospel lesson for today.

Our lesson begins where last week’s left off.  Having performed the deeply Jewish miracle of feeding the crowds in the wilderness with an unending supply of food, Jesus  disappears up the mountain when the crowds saw him merely as another human prophet and yet sought to make him king by force.  Jesus, however, did not stay on the mountaintop but rushed to be with his disciples during the night as they were caught in a sudden storm.  The crowds, already painted by the apostle John as quite thick-headed and oblivious,  set off to the nearest city in order to look for him: Capernaum.

   When they found him on the other side of the lake they ask him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”  Jesus, however, as he so often does in John’s gospel, answers the crowds by not answering them, at least not directly.  He replies to their question by going deeper, by answering not their words but addressing the very reasons why they are there in first place.  He says, “Truly, I tell you are looking for me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate and had your fill.”  Now, in John’s gospel, the word that he uses to describe Jesus’ miraculous actions is not the word for a miraculous act, not “du-na-mis”  but “say-my-on” literally the word “sign”, the word used to describe the placard outside a merchant’s stall  or the wooden boards outside of town telling you what city it was.  To John, Jesus’ miracles were not mere acts of power, they weren’t  just interesting abilities or strange supernatural events - they were signposts, acts that by their very nature pointed the viewer to something greater, something heavenward.  Jesus says to the crowds, you are not here because you saw something that pointed you to the Father, you are not here because God is even remotely that important  you, rather you are here because your bellies were filled in especially interesting manner and that’s about it”.  He tells them “Do not work for food that spoils, but rather put your efforts into food that endures unto eternal life.  This food the Son of Man will give you, for upon him has God the Father given his seal.” 

It is here that John leads us to believe that perhaps, at least on the surface, that Jesus has finally broken through to them.  “What must we do,” they ask, ”to do the work that God requires?”  While on the surface it would seem that perhaps the crowds are finally reaching out in faith, seeking honestly to live life the way God wants them to.  The reality is this answer is incredibly odd.  For a Jew, steeped in the law and prophets since their birth, for a Jew to ask anyone what the Hebrew God required of his people is akin to a lawyer asking a judge when it would be okay to object.  It’s a very basic matter and the fact that you are asking that question betrays what your priorities truly are.  A lawyer who didn’t bother to read up on basic trial procedure is one who doesn’t value his client or his profession.  Likewise a Jew who doesn’t know how God wants them to live is a Jew who saw no value in either his God or his people.  It is an answer that betrays the hearts of the speakers and foreshadows how this conversation with Jesus is going to end.

Working with what he has, however, Jesus answers them in very basic terms.  “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”  It’s a very basic answer, one that is practically meant for children.  The whole of the Jewish religion was based on this precept, to be a Jew was to obey God’s messengers, to believe in the people that God sent to them.  That’s what Prophets were, from Moses down to Malachi.

How do the crowds reply?  With something that is just mind-numbingly ridiculous.  Like little children waiting for the great Zambini to do another magic trick, and specifically after the miracle that mimicked both Elisha and Moses, they ask, “what miraculous sign will you give, that we might see it and believe you?  Our forefathers ate manna in the desert, as the scriptures say, “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”  A people who did not believe Jesus after his first miracle want another one?   Are miracles mimicking, no outdoing, your own Prophets so commonplace that you need more to verify where this man comes from?  But still they want to see another miracle, going so far as to quote the Hebrew Scriptures as their reasoning, except in fact that exact line is not found in the Hebrew Scriptures.  It is a hazy rememberence, something close enough in the fog of memory over an item of only passing importance to them.

But Jesus does not quibble semantics, rather as he does throughout John’s gospel he goes to the very heart of the problem.  “You want a sign to prove that I am a Prophet, believing it was Moses that somehow gave your forefather’s bread from heaven.  Moses does not give you bread from heaven, my Father does.  The true bread from heaven is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Still not remotely getting it, the crowds respond, “Sir, from now on give us this bread.”   

Now, if you all are beginning to think that this is by far the worst pastoral visit ever, you’re probably not that far from the truth.  What is amazing, here, is that Jesus does not ever throw up his hands and give up on them.  Rather, he takes the opportunity to once again reveal who he really is.  Using the Divine Name reserved for Yahweh, he says, “I am the bread of life.  Whosoever comes to me will never go hungry and they that believe in me will never be thirsty again.”  Unfortunately, however, as the scene continues, the crowds despite being given another chance at faith don’t take it.  Indeed, as John’s account continues it becomes extraordinarily evident that this group of people just never will. 

You see, ladies and gentlemen, to be among the faithful is to argue with those who just will not get it.  There are people so mired in this world’s darkness that when the light comes to them they reject it because they will not understand it…they will not understand it because they will refuse to even try.  Reading through our gospel lesson today, it is clear that the crowds cannot see what Jesus is talking about. They cannot see because they are so very occupied with what is worldly.  Indeed, as Jesus tries to help them by confronting the very motives the crowds have for seeking him; it seems the crowds are just completely obsessed with getting Jesus to give them more bread.  “What sign will you do this time, will you give us bread like Moses?  How about now, will you give us the true bread from heaven?  We want this bread from now on!”  Jesus was right about them, they didn’t come to Jesus because they saw the signs, they didn’t come because their hearts yearned for a relationship with the God who made them sustained them and redeems them, they came because they ate their bread and had their fill and that’s about it.  They came not to be fulfilled, but merely to be filled full.

Such was the problem of the faithful in John’s day and such is the problem with the supposed faithful in ours.  In our day and age the Church seems absolutely beset by problems that are a constant tangent, worldly issues that tangle believers down and gets their priorities set on something other than God.   Turn on the television for even a second and you’ll see many things, like Christians arguing with evolutionists - because Scripture makes it clear that God cannot make adapting life.  The LGBT and the homosexuality question still rages hot - because Christ made it such a focus of his ministry.  Angry hateful people on street corners shout with picket signs - because picking 10 of your own favorite Bible verses to memorize out of context is what makes us Christian.

But what are we to do about this?  How are we at Eastside, a small community little C church, supposed to address the problems of the Big C Church?  I’ll tell you what we do.  We remind the world that there was a reason why Lutheran’s went into the business of church reform in the first place. 

My apologies, but was it the Presbyterians or the Pentecostals that nailed up those 95 theses?  Were the Baptists at the Diet of Worms in front of the Holy Roman Emperor; or was it the Episcopalians protesting indulgences, the selling of heavenly pardons for earthly coin.  In my opinion, I say it’s high time we remind these newbies how we kick it old school!

We need to loudly and proudly remind our brethren just what this business of the Reformation was really about because everybody seems to have forgotten.  The Great Reformation was about Values, Community, and Conscience, not about getting caught up in earthly tangents.  It was about education, in granting the public access to the very Scriptures that revealed who their God is and in a language they could understand, it was not about warring with the sciences.  The Reformation was about Christian community, about valuing everyone from lowly farmer to clergy as well as the king.  It was not about fighting over which people to exclude from bathrooms.  Finally and most importantly, the Reformation was about putting Christ back into center of the life of faith and allowing good men and women the ability to follow their consciences without needless burden by the Church and its earthly traditions. 

At the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, if I know every aspect of the fossil record and can without a doubt disprove evolution for all time, but I have not Christ, what good is it?  If I come down with a signed document from God Himself, saying that he agrees with the Westboro Baptists saying that homosexuals need to be stoned and we should applaud when a one of them is bullied into suicide, but I have lost the meek self-sacrificing rabbi in the wilderness, what good is it?  Though I have memorized every verse in every translation of Scripture and could quote it flawlessly in any language alive or dead, but I miss the Savior, its central point, what good is it?      

John’s Message needs to be our message, and that message is if the point of our faith is an earthly agenda, something other Christ, whom John calls the very Word of God, the true revealer of the Father, if our agenda is anything other than him then it is folly.  If our agenda is only proving other people wrong, proving ourselves right, or simply picking out a good book to turn into an idol, a book where we care about the words on the page but not one whit for the spirit in which they were given, then we are the fools mired in the darkness of our own worldly wants.  In whatever questions we ask and in whatever side that we take, Jesus must be at its very core or our efforts will be worth nothing.  Let us not be afraid to embrace our Lutheran heritage, the rascal whose name we bear as our tradition, and let us not be afraid to remind the world that it still needs us Lutherans to show these Protestant upstarts how it’s done.  Can I get an Amen!?!          

To What End Our Religion? Sermon 7/26/15

To What End Our Religion?

A number of people often wonder why sometimes the lectionary seems to repeat itself.  The Gospel of Matthew contains some 28 chapters, Mark 16, Luke 24, and the Gospel of John has 21.  With such a plethora of material it seems strange that the lectionary would sometimes pull from the same basic set of events one week after another.  Well, there is a reason for this and that reason is they aren’t really repeats.  Each gospel has its own story to tell.  Jesus’ life was seen as so big, so incredible, that people believed that one account would simply not do Him Justice.  While many accounts of Jesus’ life were written at various times and for various reasons, the early church very quickly came to recognize four that clearly stood above the rest – each with a slightly different view.  So while it may look to us that our lesson today is simply the same story that Craig related to us last week the reality is each gospel is told for different reasons and paints a slightly different picture.

                Last week we read from the gospel of Mark, a gospel very likely written to Gentile Christians during the Roman siege of Jerusalem.  In the midst of that reality, faced with the power of the unstoppable Roman war machine Mark uses his story of the loaves and fishes to remind his audience of the power of compassion.  Sieges, after all, often meant people would go hungry as food would be rationed or indeed used up by your soldiers, but whereas War brought hunger and death, the power of this Jesus, the power of compassion, brought food and life.  Yes, whereas Rome conquered human bodies, this Jesus conquered the human heart.  That is Mark’s story to tell, but it is not John’s story.

                No, whereas Mark was writing to Gentile Christians John seems to have written his gospel to the Greek-speaking Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire.  Though Mark wrote his gospel to encourage people who were already believers in Christ, John explicitly tells his audience that his book is written that they might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing they would have life in his name.  It is not that Jesus is less compassionate in John’s gospel, no not at all!  But rather the story that John tells uses the same facts about Jesus but for a radically different people.  And it follows that if John wants to write his gospel so his Jewish audience will come to believe in their Messiah, it is also only natural to want to highlight what that belief looks like.

                In our gospel reading for today, John has Jesus on the far side of the Sea of Galilee and a great crowd of people are following him.  However, unlike the other Gospels John makes sure to tell his audience why.  They are there because they saw the miracles that Jesus performed on the sick.  They are not there because of faith, they are not there to learn anything profound, they aren’t even there to have the sick among their number healed.  Jesus had become a TV show, a spectacle to watch if you could make the time, not unlike the circus.  Still, despite this Jesus decides to work with it.  He sits down upon the mountainside and sees this great throng of people coming toward him, waiting expectantly for a miracle.

                Knowing what they are there for, Jesus decides to take this as an opportunity to reveal himself.   He turns to Phillip and says, “Where can we get bread for all these people,” knowing very well what he is going to do.  Phillip, of course, looks upon the crowds and declares that six months of a man’s wages could not by enough bread for each one to have a bite.  Another of Jesus’ disciples, Andrew, however, responds in faith.  Wishing to find any small way to respond to his master’s wishes, he comes forward saying that he has found a boy who has some small barley loaves and a small amount of fish.  “But,” he says, “how far will they go amongst so many?”

                Jesus tells the disciples to have the crowds sit upon the grass and to let them take as much food as they want.  In a miracle both reminiscent of Elisha and the man from Baal-shalishah where God declared the crowd would eat and have some left but also reminiscent of the Exodus - where the Israelites followed God into the wilderness and were fed by God with the bread from heaven - both the crowds and the disciples find that they can have as much bread and fish as they please from this boy’s small basket and it just doesn’t ever seem to run out!  Just as the Israelites did in the wilderness so long ago, Jesus has his disciples gather what is left, wanting nothing to be wasted.  When the disciples had finished, the meal that fit into one basket had grown to fill twelve!  One basket for every tribe in Israel, as it turned out.  Twelve baskets filled to the very brim.

To us, living in our scientific day and age, this tale is seen merely as an interesting yarn of how the laws of nature were somehow broken but to John’s audience it was an act steeped in meaning and rooted in the very history of the Jewish people.  But how does the crowd respond?  Is it in faith?  Is it in gratitude and wonder?  No, despite not once in its own revered Scriptures was anyone but God ever described as having these powers, Despite that Moses never fed the Israelites miraculously with bread, despite that Elisha couldn’t make the food never run out, and despite the fact John the Baptist came mimicking Elijah down to his clothing and even his diet, the crowds proclaim that here in Jesus is the Prophet that was to come into the world.  No doubt deeply disappointed and saddened by this, Jesus senses that the crowd is even coming to make him king by force and so he retreats up the mountain- alone. 

But John doesn’t end his tale there.  Later that evening, John says, the disciples go down to the lake and set off for the city of Capernaum.  John recounts that it was dark, and that Jesus had not yet rejoined them.  As was common for sea-going travel in that part of the world, a strong wind arose and the waters became very rough.  Being poor fishermen, however, it would be very unlikely that they could afford a boat meant to take the kind of weather the sea was about to throw at them.  Indeed, as the story says, three and half miles from shore they would be too far to swim to safety if the worst should happen.  The disciples must have been on nerves end and scared almost witless.  It is then, however, that they see Jesus coming toward them walking on the waters of all things!  Already frightened I could only imagine how they felt upon seeing this.  Indeed, as other gospel writers recall the disciples believed he must have been a ghost!  In the midst of those uncertain waters though, here Jesus does something very curious.  Here, in the midst of their grave need Jesus takes the opportunity to reveal himself again.  Now, our English translations often have Jesus saying, “It is I, do not be afraid” but that isn’t quite true.  Jesus doesn’t say “It is I, do not be afraid,” he says, “Ego Eimi, may phobeisthe”- “I am, do not be afraid.”  Uttering the name Yahweh, the personal name given to Israel through the burning bush, Jesus reveals his true nature to them.  It is here we come to John’s true point.  Whereas the crowds were shown Jesus’ true nature but disregarded it for an earthly political figure, the disciples are told straight out, and they accept him willingly just as he is.  And upon his acceptance into their number, they find the boat miraculously ashore at their intended destination, safe and sound.  One instance of revealing and crowds misunderstand and reject, and God Incarnate withdraws, leaving the crowds still wandering in the wilderness, the other with acceptance and gratitude followed by miraculous salvation and rescue.

                In the ancient world, you see, they didn’t have Microsoft Word, they didn’t have printing presses or even whiteout.  To make a book was a monumental expense in terms of money, effort and time.  As such, what came out of that process wasn’t just a book and it wasn’t just a story.  It was a craft, a work of art as well as history that was written because there was an important lesson that needed to be taught.  When John wrote to his fellow Jews it was not merely to impart a story they could find in another gospel, he is not throwing out an interesting anecdote to fill up space until he reaches the resurrection, rather he is deeply challenging his audience to analyze the very motives of their Jewishness.  He is asking his fellow Israelites “To what end is our religion?”  Is our beloved national identity, is our way of life, our understanding of God and the universe, is it about seeking an authentic relationship with the God who still walks among us or is this just a selfish means to a selfish end?  Do we go about doing our religion, do we quote from our Scriptures, show up at our places of worship because we seek a real encounter with God in the wilderness of our lives, or are we just sort of here for the show and hoping to get fed?  Do we seek the King because he is there to be sought, there to be with us in our darkest night and our roughest seas, or is even He just there so we can get what we want, a king that we make by force to replace the things, the beliefs, and the people that we don’t like?  These are the challenges John is placing before his audience, and they are as valid for the faithful now as they were two thousand years ago.

So the question must be asked, not only of us personally but as an American Church: To what end is our religion?  What are our motives, why do we as American Christians go about this business of faith?  Is it to be entertained?  Is it something to do when we have a day off?  When we argue our faith over against another, when we quote our Scriptures and invoke our God, is it for the other person’s benefit - or is it forcing the kind of Jesus we want to be king over their lives?

Ladies and gentlemen let it not be so!  I have been an American Christian for some 38 years and I am sorry to say that the most selfish and manipulative people I have met have never been atheists, and that is to our shame as a nation.  But is it not to our shame as a congregation.  Like the disciples, when we saw the public’s reactions to the gospel of forgiveness, an attempt to take the truth of God’s love and twist it into something it wasn’t, we left.  We looked out at those lonely waters and we struck it out on our own knowing fully the dangers those waters posed.  We went anyways.  When those waters got rough, when we were scared trying to keep the waves from crashing in and swamping what we meagerly had, we saw Jesus out on the waves and we invited him in just as he was, and those storms came and went didn’t they? 

I am not telling you this lesson because you need to learn it, you already know it well! No, I am telling this lesson because this is the lesson that disciples teach to others.  Just as John understood this lesson nearly two millennia ago and was empowered to challenge his fellow Hebrews so it is our job to learn this lesson well so we might challenge the faithful of our own era.  And let this be our message: Accept the real Jesus.  Not the Jesus that is to your liking, not the Church that puts on the best show, not the Christianity that lets you force your understandings onto others.  The real Jesus.  The Jesus who invites us to know Him and His Father in every act that they do.  The Jesus who affirms others as a good people with an honorable history worthy to be called the children of God.  The Jesus who would rather withdraw than let us make a mistake and the Jesus who comes off of mountaintops and across stormy seas to be with his own when they need Him most.  That is the Jesus of John, and may we be ever faithful to Him.  Amen and Amen.