proper12-july-29.md

Homily: St. Paul’s July 29

Welcome & Thank you

It’s certainly been a while since I was last here and it’s good to be back. Thank you to your rector for inviting me to be with you during her vacation time this summer.

Mary Pat is unable to be here today because of surgery she had on her foot at the beginning of the summer. The surgery was relatively straightforward but the recovery is a slow-going process.

Telling the story (Narrative)

Have you been following the magnificent story we’ve been hearing in the first reading this summer? It’s the Great David, introduced by the steady hand of – well sometimes the not so stay or accurate hand of – Samuel. And, of course, God who provides the winning hand.

I’m so grateful to the adjusted readings we get because of the Common Lectionary. We get to listen to continuous readings from the Old Testament in a way we weren’t before the last 15 years or so. We’re in the midst of the narrative about David.

It turns out David is really important as you read throught the rest of the Old Testament and then open up the New Testament. Tradition has attributed the book of Psalms to David – and they quote from, or are quoted in, much of the rest of the Old Testament. And then we open the New Testament and right off the bat we are introduced to Jesus’ as the “Son of David” and we hear his heritage traced back to Abraham. At least in part the New Covenant which is presented by the New Testament (they are the same words) as “David’s Covenant”. We heard that articulated at the end of the reading last week:

“I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me”

We get a pretty significant twist to this narrative today. It wasn’t until I began to teach the Bible that I began to understand the real significance of this narrative about David & Bathsheba.

It is something like this:

Until now, David has been presented as something of a founding father of the people of Israel. A little like George Washington I think you could say. We’ve heard an account of his mythical-like origins, heroic in stature, going up against the likes of Goliath. We have heard God make a profound covenant with him.

Then this week we begin his encounter with a great beauty, one of the great loves of his life, Bathsheba. The story seems to be preparing is to anticipate that he is going to pair up with a great feminine figure to match his masculine stature. The narrative prepares us for such an encounter, which, of course, we don’t get. It doesn’t work out the way we think it should.

It’s like a best friend is sharing with his friend the adventure he is having but he doesn’t know how it’s going to turn out. The best friend says, "Oh, yeah, I have heard a story like that! It goes … [fill in the blanks] … By the time the best friend is finished with the story he realizes that it actually ends in catastrophe. He realizes the mistake and says, “Oops I guess maybe I shouldn’t have told that story.”

We get the ending next week, but you know, well, it doesn’t turn out so well. It is actually one among quite a number of stories and legends about women that are horrifying to our ears. A real challenge to know what to do with.

In this case at least in part what we need to do with the story is to conclude that the great hero of our faith and of the nation of Israel – King David – in addition to being a hero was also a profound schmuck. That gives hope to the rest of us who are maybe more parts schmuck than we are heroes.

It is a powerful story and one that can take our breath away, particularly when we take it to present the way in which God loves even one such as myself. Personal and transformative.

Paul’s excerpt has a breathless sentence.

We hear a continuation of a reading from Paul also today. From his letter to the Ephesians. In this NT letter, which we read from through the end of the summer, we have a scope of concerns that is, for me, breathless. Paul takes a cosmic view of what it means to be a human being. God, the God of the Universe mind you, is concerned with the likes of you and me. For that reason he has provided – in his immense scheme of things – a path for redemption, through adoption as heirs of his inheritance.

Paul has a very different way of telling a story than does the writer of the book of Samuel. He has a different story to tell also. I hear breathlessness in Paul’s words as he goes on and on, compiling one magnificent vision upon another and upon another. In the English translation of the Greek that we have heard today, after a brief introduction, there is just a single sentence!

Paul’s is so filled with enthusiasm and passion for his vision of redemption that he wants to get it all out at once. He wants to tell it with such power and conviction that others will be brought under the same power of redemption that he has known.

Powerful stories are contagious with the power to save.

John’s account of feeding: attention to detail

With the Gospel passage from John that we hear today we get another powerful narrative, intended to convey the same sense of effectiveness that can change lives. During the year of reading from Mark’s Gospel (Year B) we hear also throughout from the gospel of John. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest and our lectionary is 3 years long but there are 4 gospels. So the intention is that we will hear from John sporadically and intermittently through the 3 years.

The passage today combines what are often 2 separate stories in the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The feeding of the multitude and Jesus’s walking on the water. It turns out that the story of the feeding of the multitude is a distinctive narrative in the gospels. There are surprisingly few narratives that occur in all four gospels. That’s a story unto itself and needs another time. But not only does it occur in all 4 gospels, – in effect – , it is repeated 2 more times for good measure. There are 4 accounts of the feeding of 5,000 and 2 accounts of the feeding of 4,000.

Clearly among the first generation of Christians, Jesus’s miraculous feeding was experienced as one of the most powerful, the most contagious, the most effective at bringing about the experience of salvation about which Paul had written. Ranking right up there with the Crucifixion itself – which is only repeated 4 times.

John’s version of this narrative has been for me distinctive and powerful in its own special way. He pays attention to details that the other gospel writers gloss over. He allows me to enter into his story.

John presents the boy as if he was just like the boy I passed on the street the other day. I feel like I know him. He observes that there was a grassy place. Why mention that? It makes me feel the grassy sod underneath bare feet.

John pays attention to the distance that the disciples rowed the boat in the stormy waters, up to the point that Jesus miraculously comes walking upon the water.

I once heard someone interpret the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides (Rambam) as saying about miracles that:

Miracles are not a super-natural manifestation of the impossible. They are a sign of what is possible.

John is writing his powerful Gospel (“Good news”) in order to show what God is doing in our world – not some other world. And one of the things he intends to bring about through this powerful story he puts into the words of Jesus: “Do not be afraid.” And then in the blink of an eye the boat comes home to harbor.

What story do we tell?

If we were in a position to share a breathless story, what would it be. What is your breathless story?

On our refrigerator is posted the following message – it was a gift to me from my wonderful spouse – “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our breath away.”

My conviction is that each of us, no matter how young or old, rich or poor, male or female, brown yellow or green, – each of us has a story that can take one’s breath away. Each of us in need of a story so powerful that it can change and redeem our lives. Each of us is a part of a web that is entirely in God’s hands and in no other. Each of us is both in need of redemption and in touch with the Grace that saves.

Thanks be to God.

---

Appendix

lectionary

• David, Bathsheba, Joab, Uriah (unfinished story)
• next week the story finished, adding Nathan and David’s repentance
• “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

1. Passover was near … feeding of 5,000. Matt (5 & 4) Mark (5 & 4) Luke & John
2. Jesus hid from their view
3. Jesus walking on the water … where there had been storm Matthew Mark and John