Sermon by the Rev. Bernadette Hartsough. August 22, 2021
In today’s gospel we heard Jesus again describe what gives us life. We are given life by God. We are sustained by feasting on Jesus. We feast on Jesus through faith in Jesus, through partaking in the Eucharist, and through feasting on scripture. This discourse is the last section of John 6. Our readings for the last 4 weeks have been a continuation of what started with the multiplication of the 5 loaves and 2 fish. Today we have the culmination of Jesus’s explanation of how to live as his follower. How to live united with God. His teaching is difficult for Jewish disciples because drinking blood was not kosher. The disciples thought about the physicality of it; real blood, real body, human flesh. It is not about the physical body it is about the life-giving spirit. Jesus gives us life.
Ephesians reminds us that living a life in Christ is difficult. There are powers, rulers, authorities, cosmic powers, forces of evil that try to take away our life.
I want to interject here the notion of cosmic powers and forces of evil. Some people say that evil doesn’t really exist. Evil exists and evil cosmic forces exist that creep up on us, remember Nazi Germany and Hitler. Remember the genocides in places like Rwanda. In our own time I think of Newtown and 911.
These forces may start out small and build. We may be swayed to support popular government platforms that we know are wrong. We reluctantly stay silent while injustices are committed, and people are dehumanized. We are tempted by money, status, and power to be the focus of our lives. All these things sneak up on us. They tempt us. They try to convince us that we need them. We need more money, more security, more power, and more control. That is why the gospels and preachers frequently mention the lure of these things. These cosmic forces frequently have loud voices. First, they grab our attention and become our focus, then they eat away at our spiritual life.
Ephesians describes how we sustain ourselves through the onslaught of powers, rulers, authorities, cosmic powers, and forces of evil. The image in Ephesians is of a first century soldier. Ironically, the first Christians were not fighters. If anything, they were pacifists. The image in Ephesians is not one of someone starting a war but of someone defending themselves. The word stand is repeated many times in this passage not the word attack, kill, or run. Stand firm. Don’t move. Don’t topple over. Don’t run away. Don’t attack. Stand. Stay steady in your life and faith. Do not be moved.
God gives us the tools to stand firm. We have truth, righteousness, being ready to bring peace, faith, and the Word of God. These are the tools on the armor from Ephesians. We use these tools to determine if something gives life and is of God or if something is from a force not of God. If something tempts us to be dishonest, to fight, or to lose our faith in ourselves or others then it is not of God. God brings life. A life centered on truth, righteousness, peace, and faith. Any one of these can be easily distorted so that we can be made to believe that we are being righteous, telling the truth, living in peace, and having faith.
As an example of how easy it is to distort the truth, I will read an excerpt from the book A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide by Alon Confino.
“When we act badly, as individuals and collectivities, we need a good story to go along with it to justify ourselves. I recently traced this topic with respect to Germans in the Holocaust. I began with a perplexing event that happened on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938. Not only did the Nazis burn 1,400 synagogues, they also made sure they burned the Hebrew Bible. Why did the Nazis—set on constructing a racial civilization—burn a holy and religious symbol?
Burning the Bible was part of a larger story Germans told themselves during the Third Reich about who they were, where they came from and where they were headed. For the Nazis, the Jews represented an eternal, evil historical force that had to be extirpated for the new Germany to arise. The aim of the Nazis was not simply to bring political change from the democracy of the Weimar Republic, which they replaced in 1933. Their aim was to found a new racial civilization, a new humanity, and this demanded a new register of historic time, a new morality that justified a civilization built on the persecution and extermination of whole groups of people.
That story excised the Jews from Christian, German and European history, rejecting the morality embedded in the Ten Commandments and the Hebrew Bible. Burning the Bible was a Nazi transgressive act against a key symbol of their own culture, but it was also liberating: It allowed them to claim a new national identity that owed nothing to the symbolic authority of the Jews derived from the Bible or to previous moral and cultural constraints. It was not so much an anti-Christian action as it was an action to construct a new German Christianity that owed nothing to the Jews or to other Christian Europeans.
The unpleasant truth is that by telling a story about themselves, Nazis and other Germans behaved as humans often do. We all tell stories about ourselves to give our lives purpose and meaning. And we often tell these stories not to get the facts right, but to get them wrong, to explain our history and justify our motivations for doing things—the good things and especially the bad ones.Telling stories makes us human, but not all our stories are humane. Stories give life, and stories kill as well.”
Telling stories that dehumanize can become our truth. Stories like these cause us to distrust and hate others. The world becomes a place of us and them. Divisions occur.
I cannot end my sermon without mentioning the story that unfolded this week about Mercedes Lain. She was an eleven-month-old girl born into a family that had many problems. Many of us in the community helped the family. Mercedes was cared for by a friend of the family on Saturday. She was reported missing on Sunday. On Wednesday she was found dead in a wooded area in Starke County. At the time of this writing, the details are still sketchy.
The story is heart breaking. As we struggle with her death, I do know that there are many families in Plymouth that are struggling. Families in crisis that cannot cope. Families that turn to drugs to escape the realities of their daily life. Mercedes was a victim. Born into poverty and a broken family, the odds of her living a full life were against her.
As a church we need to keep helping others with truth, love, and peace. I wonder how many more Mercedes are out there. The church and the example that we give is the way of life. Maybe if Mercedes’s parents, Tiffany and Kenneth had a church and had known about Jesus’s way of life then things would have been different. I had hoped that Mercedes’s parents, could have felt more supported. So, we go on and we keep trying. Heaven has one more angel. May Mercedes rest in peace and rise in glory.