Scripture: John 21:9-19
It’s communion Sunday today, and I’m thinking about feeding, particularly spiritual feeding and what that means to me. As a sidelight, the scripture for this morning fits in well with the time of the liturgical year we are in. In the broad sweep of the Christian story, we are currently in the time between Easter and Pentecost, which the church has traditionally thought of as a time when Jesus was sort of immediately available to the disciples after the resurrection, risen from the dead but not gone from the earth. Then the story says that he ascended into heaven, essentially in my understanding of things, leaving things in the hands of his followers. But not without help, which is where the gift of the Holy Spirit comes in, which is celebrated on Pentecost, which is next Sunday.
So more about that next week, but today is what some portions of the Christian church celebrate as Ascension Sunday, and our scripture for today is appropriate for that occasion. The words we hear Jesus say in this scripture are among his last words, his parting words to the disciples, and it seems appropriate that we linger over them a few moments for ourselves and not leave them just to the disciples of the first century. The Bible of course only matters if we think its words are addressed to us.
But that all is a kind of a sidelight, all this stuff about the liturgical year. It happens that it’s the time of year between Easter and Pentecost. It happens that the scripture about some of Jesus’ parting words to the disciples where he says, “Feed my sheep,” are often read around this time of year. It happens that this is a communion Sunday, and that the idea of being fed, being spiritually fed sort of naturally goes along with communion. But really my sermon does not come from any of those places. And it is not really about how we need to take to heart Jesus’ words in the scripture where he tells the disciples to “feed my sheep”. It is not about encouraging you or encouraging myself to go out and feed Christ’s sheep. It is much more about, and certainly much more grounded in, my own current felt need for feeding. I am feeling the need to be fed.
What I have to say today I think is going to be not much, and it is going to be of necessity somewhat personal in the sense that I can’t assume, and don’t assume, that what I am feeling is exactly the same, or even remotely the same, as what anyone else feels. Nevertheless, as a personal matter, I could not stand up here this morning and pretend that all the public attention that has been focused on our prominent fellow UCC people, Barak Obama and Jeremiah Wright, that this has not been going on or that it has not affected me. It has. I am not here this morning to defend anyone or to make comments on who has acted in praiseworthy or blameworthy ways in the midst of the spectacle that has been playing out over the last couple of months and particularly over the past ten days. I am not wanting this morning to worry over the future of anyone’s political campaign or to worry over how all this attention will affect the future of the United Church of Christ. I do care about such things, and I do think about them, but that’s not what I want to talk about this morning.
I am also not wanting to comment particularly on any of the substance of what Jeremiah Wright or anyone else has said recently. Some of it is worthy of comment and there will be time for that. Some of you may know that several weeks ago there was a news conference at Trinity Church in Chicago, mostly I think to show support for Trinity Church, not just Jeremiah Wright but the whole church and for the incoming pastor as well, Otis Moss. At that news conference, the president of the United Church of Christ, John Thomas, called for what he referred to as “sacred conversations on race”. That call was repeated in a full page ad that ran in USA Today. These conversarions are called to take place within UCC churches and throughout the culture and to begin, Thomas called on UCC pastors to make this the subject of their preaching on May 18. I intend to do that. Conversations about race are certainly not a brand new idea to Sojourners, but I certainly welcome the call at any time because conversations, especially if they are in any way sacred conversations are needed all the time, and our newly formed racial justice group will no doubt want to consider what shape such conversations may take at Sojourners in the future. But that too is not where I am today.
Where I am today is feeling undernourished, underfed. I feel like I’ve been living in a sea of words and images and emotions that have left me hungry for well something, something that was not said, not present. It’s not that there has been nothing of value said in all of this. Far from it. There has been much that was thoughtful, thought-provoking, challenging, and necessary, needing to be said and heard. But it has been so surrounded and suffocated from every direction by all sorts of people using words that were cynical, self-serving, manipulative, mean, rude, ignorant, and deceitful, that it has been hard to hear and/or distinguish what has been of value, and frankly, hard for me to get past my own anger. On a different occasion I might just say that I have been saddened and depressed by the spectacle. On this occasion, for whatever reason, I have been thinking of it as being undernourished, maybe because it leaves me with a feeling of emptiness.
Of course, you could say to me that if I expect to be fed, spiritually fed, by cable news, you tube, or political campaigns then I would be out of my mind. And of course you would be right, and that is just the point that’s on my mind this morning: our need of an independent source of spiritual nourishment, especially in the current climate which feels to me so distinctly and exceptionally un-nourishing. It’s hardly a surprising thought that we would come to this place with this group of people hoping to find spiritual sustenance. Of course we do that. But I am reminded this week of how great is my need for spiritual sustenance, and frankly I don’t think there are that many places for us to turn for such a thing.
Some years ago, I was at a retreat and one of the people in the group made the comment that she believed we were being entertained to death. It was a new thought to me at the time, but it immediately rang true. In a similar vein, I have heard a number of times in the post-September 11 era that a good way to combat depression about the state of the world and maybe other kinds of depression as well is to go on a radical media diet: limit your intake of media as much as possible. It is food that does not satisfy, as Isaiah would say. Why do you spend your time and energy on food that does not satisfy, Isaiah asks?
None of these are hard thoughts to have in the sense of being difficult to grasp. A little harder maybe to heed, since we seem to have a broad cultural addiction to entertainment, including the reality show that our political life seems to have been reduced to. I thought a little about postponing communion until next week, which is Pentecost and is when Amber Lyon will be confirmed. I wanted to be sure to have communion then, and we will, but as I thought about it, I said to myself that I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m in need of communion. And I’m in need of being called back to the basics of my faith, because regardless of where current events may temporarily lead us, regardless of who wins in a political campaign, regardless of what anyone now thinks or comes to think of Jeremiah Wright, our tasks will be the same, we people of God.
I recalled the verses from Isaiah as I was thinking about things this week, how easily I find myself gravitating toward things that may attract my attention in some perverse way but that are not so likely to feed me. But when Isaiah remarks on how often we spend our labor and money for things that do not really satisfy, it also made me ask another question. Is it really satisfaction that we want or need? People talk sometimes about spiritual hungers and we think of spiritual food, maybe as something that will take the hunger away. But that may not be quite right.
It may be, in fact I believe it to be so, that faith itself is a hunger. It is a longing, a searching, a hoping, a desiring after God. And therefore we are fed not so much by things that satisfy us spiritually, but rather we are fed by whatever it may be that awakens that spiritual hunger within us. It is a paradox, to be sure, but we are fed by things that make us hungry—hungry for righteousness, hungry for justice, hungry for peace, hungry for God.
Images of faith, for me, almost always involve a reaching out of some kind. Forget faith. I know myself to be most alive when I am hungry, hungry for something worth being hungry for. And so what feeds me, as I say, is what brings to life that hunger within me, and therefore brings me to life. And I will testify here too that Jesus has, for me, been one who makes me hungry for the things of God, makes me hungry for the reign of God, hungry that God’s will be done on earth. Because Jesus feeds me with that hunger, because he brings me to life in that way, he is for me the bread of life.
How do we feed each other? May we do our best to make one another hungry, hungry for a new creation, hungry for a reign of shalom. Let this be our prayer, as we offer to one another today the bread of life. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 4, 2008