Bishop's Visit - January 19th 2020 - The Rt. Rev. Larry Benfield's Sermon

                        Larry R. Benfield

                        Epiphany 2 – Year A

                        19 January 2020

                      

Have you noticed how hard it is these days to serve anyone a meal that everyone can enjoy? There are now so many diets that form our food choices. Christian Wiman, a poet and person of deep faith, has a poem in this month’s Poetry Magazine whose first line is “All my friends are finding new beliefs,” and four lines later names some of them: Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. Only the last one sounds the least bit enticing. Part of what he says in the poem is that life can be so complicated, as in all these partiular new “knowledges” or explantions of how things work that we think will save us, but ultilmately don’t. 

In a similar vein, the one-time New York restaurant critic William Grimes wrote that long ago, before anyone had heard of potato foam, or, I might add, vegan sushi, waiters performed a very basic function. They stood and took your order. If there were specials, they recited them. When the food came out of the kitchen, they delivered it to the table. You ate. Everyone seemed happy. It all seems hopelessly old-fashioned now. The old-time waiter with a notepad and pencil stub is now a food counselor, who invariably asks, “Does anyone at the table have any allergies the chef needs to know about?”

Sometimes people tell us more than we need to know, or explain until our eyes glaze over, and we run in the opposite direction because it is more than we can handle. It happens in religion as much as, perhaps even more so, than it happens in restaurants. Look at poor old John the Baptist in today’s gospel. Not only can he not get the facts straight; he can’t stop talking, and seems temporarily to inhibit the spreading of the good news.

In the vignette from his life that we heard read today, John is surrounded by his disciples. His cousin Jesus is new on the scene. John sees Jesus coming down the road and goes into a long soliloquy on who this Jesus is. What I am about to say may seem strange to your ears, given centuries of liturgical and theological talk, but scholars do not know why John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” John gets it wrong. In John’s day, bulls, goats, and sheep were used as sacrifices for sin, but not lambs. And if John is trying to associate Jesus with the Passover lamb, there is the same problem: neither was that lamb a sacrifice for sin.

Anyway, the interesting twist in the gospel is that John gives this long speech that day, and then nothing happens. All his theological stuff, like, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me,” and no one follows Jesus as a result. All that complicated explication and nothing takes place. Then the next day Jesus comes along again. This time John may have come to his senses. He simply says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” He doesn’t even throw in the bit about taking away the sin of the world. And what happens? Jesus picks up two followers. Could the writer of the gospel of John be telling us that we can be barriers to the gospel when we try pick the gospel to pieces, with a detailed answer or explanation for everything, much like a fellow diner or a waiter who makes a meal miserable by giving us too much information when all we want to do is eat?

If you need an example of what I am saying, remember that Christianity changed lives dramatically for centuries when it emphasized simply telling the story. We all know the power of stories to shake us to the very core of our being. For example: Did you hear about the first two humans? Did you hear about the young, unmarried girl who gave birth in a stable? Did you hear about the martyr stoned to death?  Yes, we know Adam and Eve and Mary and Stephen. They make for great stories. We can relate to them. And plwerful story-telling continues even today. The civil rights movement, for example, got legs when television audiences saw water hoses and dogs attacking marchers. Sometimes we simply need to let the story speak. We are called to be the waiter who simply lets those who are hungry sit down and eat.

The problem with Christianity in the last three hundred years is that we Christians stopped telling our stories, and began instead to explain them, usually scientifically after the Enlightenment, and these days often moralistically. We started lecturing about the story rather than telling it. It has  all been very unappetizing. The stories lost their power to change lives. In fact, most people these days haven’t even heard the stories because we stopped telling them. We lost our power to be evangelists in large part because we thought we had nothing to say, or even worse, began to love the sound of our own voices. Or worst of all, we got the story wrong and started talking about how limited God’s love is.

Now, I am not here to say that there are simple answers to all or even a majority of life’s questions. Far from it. The hurts and disappointments we encounter are often complicated. But I am convinced that Christianity still has a simple power. The stories in sacred scripture still resonate deep inside people’s hearts and souls, because the stories are not simply history; they are about you and me and the struggle that we have in our own lives. People still need to hear that they do not suffer alone. That their mistakes can be overcome by God’s love. And we do that through stories, more often than not stories of how we see the risen Christ in the oddest of places, as in a gardener or a fisherman or in someone locked in the same situation as we are. What we have to ask ourselves is how it is that we as waiters, servants of God, stop lecturing and let the stories reclaim their power, because people still need to eat and be nourished.

Here is how we can do so. We keep the doors of this place open and make it possible for people to hear the story.We keep the arms of the risen Christ spread wide so that people will feel at home, feel reassured, feel part of the family, feel that they are safe in sharing their own stories. We open our hearts to those who walk in, and we find ways to open our hearts to those who will never be in this building. We tell our friends that there is good story telling going on in church every weekend. We take water and we wash people. We literally touch them as a sign of relationship and God’s love. And always, we get dinner ready and offer it to the hungry. In other words, we act out the stories of sacred scripture. 

To use William Grimes’ language, we will stand and take an order. We will recite the special. We will deliver food to the table. It will work rather well. In the process we will not only feed the newcomer; we will find ourselves fed as well. And I don’t think that in the process we will have to worry about explaining everything, for if we serve well, then God’s love will be perfectly clear.

 Amen.