The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, "Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you."

Tonight’s Gospel passage is part of a long sermon given to the 5000 that just ate of the loaves and fishes; or at least as many as followed in boats across the lake that Jesus walked on to cross. Why did Jesus walk on water? To get to the other side.

This sermon is so long that it’s broken up over several Sundays. It’s John’s version of the institution of the Eucharist, which John omits from the last supper. Tonight we get to the point where he says the bread from heaven is his flesh. Next week, he gets even more specific by saying unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood; you have no life in you.  For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.

There was a time when Christians were accused of cannibalism. While not literally true, the Eucharist is a form of ritual cannibalism. I suppose you could argue that it’s not even ritual cannibalism because we’re eating God’s flesh and not a human’s; however God wouldn’t have flesh at all if it wasn’t for the human Jesus. As I’ve said before, we know God now has flesh since the resurrected Christ still retained Jesus’ wounds, sharing in our wounds.

Back to our Gospel, I’d like to unpack the meaning of the bread of life, and in doing so unpack an aspect of the Eucharist. As Kate often says, we can interpret the Bible though the Bible, and so I’ll look at tonight’s Gospel through the lens of the first Letter of John.

The letter opens with a similar hymn to the one in John’s Gospel. In it John refers to the Word of life, for it was through the Word that God created life. He emphasizes life again when instead of saying the word was made flesh he says LIFE was made visible. Christ Jesus IS life itself; and further life was made by Love. For God, the first person of the trinity is love.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whatever it exactly means to love is the topic of a whole other sermon, probably on First Corinthians, but I bring it up now, because so often when we talk theological matters we forget to mention love.

In fact John in his letter lets us know that the promised eternal life is love. For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: we should love one another.  If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, then you will remain in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made us: eternal life.

We’ve talked a lot this last year about living as if you’re already dead and risen into the Kingdom. I’ve mentioned that I see this as a form of Christian detachment from the ways of the world; the ways of mankind, really, because creation itself is beautiful.  You see the Western mind often confuses detachment with heartlessness. I’m talking about a detachment that allows us to truly love.

We can see more and more that the values of this world are not loving at all. There’s only one love allowed in an austerity world where people are reduced to economic units (capitalism and communism both do this.) Pop song and Soap Opera love, a slavish love that keeps women in their place. Christ tells us to even love our enemies, and that can only be done with a certain amount of detachment. We need to remove the way we think and relate to people from the corrupting values of this world. Especially when we rightfully condemn those values, we need to recognize that God loves even those that act on them-just as god loves us when we sin.

I’m not saying this should replace romantic love or love of friends and family, Jesus had his inner circle of close friends too. I’m saying that when we find people that are hard to love, it’s important to remember that God loves both you and them. Even more, contrary to the values of humankind, we need to love ourselves, otherwise we sin against Jesus’ summary of the law, love your neighbor as yourself. For some of us, that may take a similar detachment, to see ourselves as a loving God does, not as we judge ourselves.

All of this is hard, very very hard. But very soon we’ll be doing as Jesus asks, eating His flesh and drinking his blood. We will nourish ourselves with life made manifest and we will abide in God’s love. "Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you."

Who will listen to me?

I’ve asked this as a priest whose very sanity is not respected in most Christian denominations, much less my ordination. It’s also a question for a queer Christian or even a left leaning Christian talking to a conservative family. Or for that matter - a queer Christian talking to the queer community – for different reasons of course, reasons in this case profoundly important. It has to do with power.

And our texts today basically say, it isn’t about whether they listen or not. It’s about being a prophet anyway. That’s plainly stated in Ezekiel. It’s a bit more oblique in Paul, but it’s there. It’s in our weakness that God perfects power. I’ve heard more than one argument that Paul’s weakness was homosexuality.  None of those arguments are terribly compelling. I also will not frame queerness as weakness. Like it or not, though, others will. Chances are, though, the ones who will frame queerness as weakness are the ones who have rebelled against God. This also applies to those who see poverty as weakness or the feminine as weakness or bleeding hearts as weakness, etc.

Jesus could do not works of power in his home town, because the people there would not accept power could be found in the ordinary, in the familiar, much less in weakness. So Jesus went elsewhere. There are even many stories in the Gospels where the gentiles see the power in Jesus when the Israelites do not.  The unclean woman who spent all her money and found no cure drew power from Jesus, in a crowd full of the clean and healthy. Almost all the prophets had something that could be held against them; Moses’ stutter, Jonah’s resentment, etc. The powerful in this world do not need God’s power, nor can they understand it.

It’s absolutely true that a prophet speaks truth to power, whether they listen or not. However, I think we miss the other side of the coin, to speak power to those the powerful deem weak. There’s a very brief and poignant moment in Jesus Christ Superstar that has always struck me as the truest moment in the whole musical:

 Neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand

Nor the Romans, nor the Jews

Nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the Priests, nor the scribes

Nor doomed Jerusalem itself

Understand what power is

Understand what glory is

Understand at all

Understand at all

I know I often fail to understand. I often burn with the passion to speak truth to power, to tell them what’s for – as Jesus spoke to the Pharisees. My perceived weakness, however, pretty much guarantees results like Jesus got in his hometown. In fact I’ve posted in online threads about LGBT inclusion only to be completely ignored by the straight people arguing about it.

What I don’t have, and need to pray for, is a similar burning passion to get past my “Who will listen to me?” fears within queer circles. That is where results are more probable. Again, not that it’s about results, but who actually needs and deserves God’s power in these messy times; those who are suffering or who will suffer before long.  In Ohio a bill was recently introduced to prevent custody being taken away from parents who want to send their kids to queer conversion facilities. 

I know that there are things in my life I could never have done without God’s power. In these times, telling those who are powerless or soon to be powerless in the eyes of the law need to be shown that God’s power is for them. We need to be sharing god’s power with each other more than ever.  

Sermon on Mark 3:20-35

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

I couldn’t help but think of these words from Paul’s letter to the Romans after reading our Gospel for this week. Christ names His followers siblings - and if siblings, then joint heirs. But as Jesus is accustomed to do, he turns the meaning upside down.

In Matthew Jesus says we care for the suffering of others will inherit the Kingdom. Now to inherit normally means that the father dies. But God the Father doesn’t die, it’s Her children that die to inherit. This is another aspect of what we’ve been saying all along – that to live a Christian life, live as if you’ve already dead.

As Mark likes to do he inserts a story within a story. So within the story about Jesus’ family, we get the story of unclean spirits. Perhaps the major concept Jesus turns on its head is the notion that God cannot be in the presence of the unclean. This notion, that the unholy corrupts the holy, is the reason the Pharisees have so many rules keeping people away from the Temple – away from God.

Unclean spirits in Mark cause suffering such as insanity, muteness and self-destructive behavior. Jesus casts out these spirits. But if the presence of the unclean chases away God, that only leaves Satan, whose minions these spirits are, with authority to cast them out.

Jesus is saying, you’ve got it all backwards. God cleans the unclean. The Holy makes the unclean holy. The spirit that came to me in my baptism gave me the strength and wisdom to resist Satan’s temptations. I have bound that strong man up and am plundering his property, the ones his minions have claimed. You blaspheme the Holy Spirit by not even allowing for its existence in your worldview.

So Jesus walks through these barrier laws, the laws that keep people from God. He heals on the Sabbath, He forgives sins, and He cleans the unclean. Those who have been kept from god now know God. The God who hears the suffering of Her people.

This brings us to living a Christian life - much of Christendom has flipped Jesus’ message back over. I personally know many people who feel they can’t enter a Church without cleaning up their act or getting their shit together. This breaks my heart. It is not how God wants us to be thinking. In my own case there isn’t any way I could have gotten what shit I’ve managed to get together without God.

And truth be told, I used to think that God was sick at the sight of me and wanted me cast where He didn’t exist – Hell. Now I understand that there is nowhere God can’t be found. Even, and it pains me to say this, even in the abandoned Wal-Mart where children as young as one year old – children who were ripped from their mothers arms by ICE agents – where these children are kept in such conditions that they won’t let US senators in to see them – even there God can be found.

And believe me; I’m not assuming anyone there is showing these children any kindness. Matthew tells us God knows when every sparrow falls – not that God prevents the sparrow from falling. But if any of these children come out of this able to trust or love anyone again - that I believe would be God at work.

And yet, somehow, people are saying they deserve this. This is what comes of thinking of people as unclean. This is what comes of believing other people will make you unclean and unworthy of God. This is why Jesus tells us to love our enemy. It’s all so easy to start thinking of our enemy as unclean, as other.

Thinking of people as unworthy of God – as incapable of repentance and forgiveness, is not the kingdom of God. Jesus is clear that some people don’t belong in the kingdom, but also tells us we don’t get to decide who. That’s His job.

Our job, what I really believe is our job, in addition to caring for the suffering, is to set Jesus’ message back on its head. To tell our fellow Christians, and those who suffer at their hands, that even a mustard seed of Holiness can clean the unclean. That dehumanizing people in the name of purity is the opposite of what Jesus taught.

We who look foolish to the perishing, we who have inherited through our own death and not Our Father’s, we who cannot live by the values of this world, we who desire to live as if the Kingdom has already come, we who have had the spirit work within us, we can glorify that spirit and not blaspheme it. 

We’ve been talking about living as if you’ve already died. And during Lent we spoke a great deal about what we need to die to; how we need to separate ourselves from the ways of the perishing, those who do not live the lives of mercy, love and tending to the suffering. And we admit that it is very difficult in the time and place we find ourselves in.

And so tonight our scripture reminds us that we can’t possibly do this by ourselves. We can’t without specifically abiding in Christ, or, to use a more colloquial word, remaining in Christ. I’ve said before that a relationship with God takes work; prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading scripture, and the intimate act of the Eucharist.

The metaphor of the vine is a good metaphor for this, a good way of thinking about the importance of cultivating a relationship with God through Jesus. It may be John’s writing style or a lack of agricultural understanding, but I find this passage brings a somewhat limited understanding of a relationship with Jesus Christ. It is true that from Christ I get power, or metaphorically sap or however the branch feeds the vine. I get strength to deal with what I can’t handle on my own – overcoming my social anxiety in order to do justice work for example. It’s in John’s letter, though, that I get a sense of what abiding in Christ really means.

We love because he first loved us. It’s not enough to take John’s word on this. To truly abide in Christ we have to develop our own sense of this. I used to say I never understood God’s love until I got into a relationship where someone actually showed me what real love is. Nowadays however, I see and understand that people did truly love me prior to that relationship. What I took as “true” love was the experience of someone delighting in me.

And that’s my personal take on God’s words at Jesus’ baptism, “In whom I am well pleased.” There’s a tendency to read merit into those words. I rather hear that as akin to what I experienced with my ex. She showed joy in my mere presence, admiration of my little quirks, giddiness in seeing my own joy, and more - Which is not to say we didn’t have our differences and arguments. What I should be clear about is that these displays of love continued well past the honeymoon period. They were genuine and sincere.

Jesus tells us that God has counted every hair on our head. That’s how much God delights in us. Embrace that, sink into it, God, creator of the entire Universe, doesn’t dispassionately love us, but loves us joyfully. So what is there to fear? Abiding in this is how we live as if we’re already dead.

Like anything else on the spiritual journey, this takes work. One technique I was taught was to imagine someone you know loved you, a relative or friend that had passed on, to imagine them embracing you from behind and saying “I love you” as you prayed or meditated. Eventually, over time, I came to understand that as God saying it.

There are certainly more ways to pray and meditate on this, ways that may suit you better. I will tell you when I first started cultivating this sense of God’s love there was a lot of pushback from my internalized negative messages. It wasn’t pleasant work. Get support in doing this.

A lot of Christians, myself included, were taught to love our neighbors instead of ourselves, not as ourselves. We equate self-love with narcissism. But seriously, there are times and places in the Christian year for self-examination and righting our wrongs. In Easter we do not say the confession, because this is the time to learn to abide in God’s joy in our mere existence. To find joy not just in Christ’s resurrection, but that it was for delight in us, that the cross, tomb and resurrection happened.

To love others, our neighbors, our enemies even, we need to abide in God’s love for us. It’s the only way it can happen. In this world, loving ourselves can be the hardest thing of all. Especially if you’re not a white, straight, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, protestant cis man, because if you are not, you’ve been told in one way or another that you’re fundamentally wrong. The work of Christ is ahead of us, for now, finding joy in God’s love for us, for each other and for ourselves is our task.

I was recently talking to some fellow Christians about my belief that the Glory of the Cross turned upside down the whole idea of glory. Glory no longer belonged to the victor, but now belonged to the victim. The immediate response was, “Are you encouraging suffering?” Not at all, there’s plenty of suffering out there. I’m more concerned with how we view justice. The Good Samaritan didn’t tell the broken man on the road, “I’ll go find those bandits and kill them for you.” He bound his wounds and paid for his recovery.

In fact I’d argue that a triumphalist view of the cross and resurrection is what encourages suffering. It tells us to endure our suffering until that final day when Jesus’ victory comes to fulfillment. I want it made clear that leaving others to endure their suffering is not what I mean when I speak of living life as if we’re already dead. 

Ivone Gebara, the feminist theologian I respect the most, speaks of salvation as living a life of resurrection. She works with the poor women of Brazil, whose suffering is practically invisible and hear triumphalism as a command to suffer silently.

Jesus was sent to us because God heard the suffering of Her people. I think especially the ones who suffer in silence do to oppression. Sister Gebara reminds us that Jesus did not suffer alone; that the women were with Him to the end and tended to His body. Women’s’ work (Whether it’s women who do it or not) the work done behind the scenes to maintain community is mostly taken for granted.

And for Gebara, it is there you will find salvation in the here and now. Resurrection is found in the midst of suffering through the daily ways we nourish love, our bodies, and our lives. We must search for these moments every day just as we begin the actions of eating and drinking. Resurrection is closely linked in the Hope to carry on. So when I say live as if you’re already dead, that is a daily process a daily commitment.

This brings me to our readings today. As John says in his letter, “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” And I would say this still is true. This world does not want to know the hungry, the naked, the prisoner, the refugee; it does not want to know Christ. It does not want to know to whom the glory belongs. It does not acknowledge daily resurrections these people find to carry on; daily resurrections that Glorify God.

The world doesn’t want to know the Children of God, who are the ones living as if they are already dead and free from the perishing world. And by the perishing world, I very much mean the oppressors, not those who struggle to find resurrection in their daily oppressed lives.

I also feel the need to mention that when John speaks of lawlessness, he is referring to the law written in our hearts, not the laws of the oppressors. The righteous from my point of view, are those people who search for daily resurrection. Who search for love, for tending to bodies and lives in the here and now, our own included.

Our other two readings mention being witnesses; witnesses to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In a world where far too many people think being a Christian is primarily about being a homophobic anti-abortionist, Christ need true witnesses. Part of my daily resurrection practice is to find opportunities to tell people who the glory really belongs to, who Christ is.

This is a key passage to my misunderstanding of John’s Gospel. I originally read this as a snarky dismissal of the agony in the garden which the other Gospels describe. “Yeah, right, like I’d say save me from this hour – no way.” That was what I heard before I realized John puts post resurrected Jesus’ words into pre-resurrected Jesus’ mouth.

And in this particular case, it’s a post decision Jesus. It’s post Jesus saying your will not mine. For all the times I’ve read it, I never picked up on the admission of a troubled soul. This suggests to me that it’s not a matter of Jesus’ soul ceasing to be troubled, but rather Jesus is determined to follow through on His decision despite a troubled soul.

And quite frankly, troubling your souls was something I worried about but decided to risk in picking the theme of living like you’re already dead. Dying to this world, dying to the life of the perishing, and living God’s will, living out love on God’s scale, wasn’t even easy for the fully God fully man Son.

In Mark and Mathew’s Gospels, the angels come and tend to Jesus after the temptation in the desert. In Luke, the temptations are called trials and the angel comes to comfort Jesus in the garden, after His last trial; the final temptation to avoid the cross. The trial in which he makes his decision to fully submit to God’s will.

One hopes, that whichever service you attend on Easter Sunday, you will be asked to renew your baptismal vows; the baptism in which you symbolically die with Christ to be born anew. It will be your time to make the decision again to love on God’s scale. Love on a scale that sadly will separate you from this world, separate you from the values of the perishing, values based in very limited love, if love at all.

So if this is about love, why is the word hate in our Gospel today? What does Christ mean by hating your life? Again sadly, for many Christians, that means hating yourself. It’s certainly the view I was raised to have. But that doesn’t make much sense if we’re to love our neighbor as ourselves. It’s our life, not who we are that’s the issue. Christ promises a life beyond our meager and limited one, the one that we think belongs to us.

Our life-force, which keeps us alive, never did belong to us. It was a gift from God in the first place. In the mad scramble for money and power, for the anti-beatitudes of this world, we’re taught to own things, to steal our life from God and call it ours. So when comes the time for god to take our life back, we lose it forever. So if we, now, make a decision to give our lives back to God, to admit it was never ours to begin with, it will never be lost.

I do believe, as our other texts claim that God’s law is written in our hearts. The ways of the perishing teach us otherwise. We learn to fear and be defensive and look at others as less than, or for that matter even more than us. We learn hate and greed and we learn to use others. We cling to things and even people, and try to own them; just as we are deluded that we own our own lives.

There is so much to let go of, so much to die to, ironically it can take a lifetime to do this. It will not happen without trouble in our souls. We cannot do this instantly, without help and support from others who are on this path as well. What we can do right now, what we can do on Easter, what can be done in a moment is make a decision. Make a decision to go forward with this work despite our troubled souls, our doubts and even our confusion at this seeming paradox.

We won’t do this alone - can’t really. Even Jesus brought his closest friends with him to the Garden. In fact trying to go this alone is one of the ways the values of the perishing diminish - if not outright kill - love. We also have Jesus’ who promises to be with us. He guides us in scripture, prayer and meditation. He is in the bread and wine we’ll share very soon. We’ll share that with each other, the very ones we, as a community, support in the work ahead.