August 19, 2012, "Subjecting"

To whom and what will you commit your life to be subject to? As Americans, part of our identity is that we are not the subjects of any King or Queen or Royalty. Simply to identify what we are not was grounds for Revolution, but does not identify what we do stand for. What is important to us? Paul's letter to the Ephesians, which we adapted this morning as our Call to Worship, identifies that “out of reverence for Christ, we subject ourselves to one another.” Grammatically, if we make ourselves the Subject of our own universe, we objectify everything else, and all the world, all the universe, becomes a projection existing in response to us... But if we subject ourselves to one another, as we live in relationship to others, our purpose in existence becomes doing whatever is necessary to fulfill them, in faith to bring them to God. If we subject ourselves to no one, we commit blasphemy because we make ourselves out to be God. In our minds we imagine ourselves as all powerful and all knowing; and yet, not the God of the Scripture, because that God, God Almighty intentionally chose to be incarnate, to be born, be real and die, to be subject to the needs of the world. Our Gospel passage from John this day begins with two crucial subjects. Faith is a life and death proposition, and Jesus Christ is the life of the world. This life is not of our manufacture, but is a gift, Christ's gift, and our life, our words, our actions, our relationships, what we do with our time, matters. Increasingly, the weddings I officiate, are not couples 18 and 19 years of age. One of the questions I routinely ask of every couple is “Why get married?” A recent wedding was for a 70 and 80 year old, who had each been married previously, and I think I left them speechless. I recall describing that you are about to complicate your life, your children's estates, you will love Social Security benefits by being married, this is not a casual decision, “Why marry?” It's a wonderfully open-ended question, which could lead to describing why marry this person, or why you believe you are ready to be married, sometimes one in the couple has a sense of humor and describes making an honest person of the other. But the only response that matters is: “I have thought this through, and I cannot live without this other, I want to live as part of their life.” Conviction about what matters, committing to what/who matters to us, these are faith statements.Yesterday, someone asked me why we should offer a Children's Choir? Whether it is for entertainment, for child care, because adults like having one, or because we want to teach music theory and dynamics? To me, the answer is the same as the reason we invested our time and energies and resources in rebuilding this church, in doing mission, in anything we do as the church, or in life... Because after consideration and thinking through, we want to meet people where they are, providing them this opportunity to know God in Jesus Christ. What we need to provide may be different for every individual, and in future times just as in the past the how may change, but the commitment to live in response to the needs of others, sharing who we know God to truly be, does not change. Tragically, the authors of the Lectionary, because of concern for time in worship, and focusing upon what they have identified as most important, have truncated our lessons for this day. If we were to read all of the first three chapters of I Kings, we would come to understand a fuller story of Solomon. That as an adult, Solomon's father King David died. Solomon was not the first born, but the very youngest, and David's family life was like a soap-opera. Solomon, the firstborn of Bathsheba and David after they married, is ordained King of Israel to fulfill the promise of God, that instead of David building a house for God, God would create a monarchy, a lineage and House of David. Solomon, like his father David begins a life of trying to respond to everything, making everyone happy and satisfying no one. He has built a large palace for his pleasure. He has taken a wife from the Princesses of Egypt. He has made a practice of touring ancient places to make sacrifices, because it seems what you do when visiting these places. By editing out all of this, Solomon steps onto the stage of Scripture, as a fully defined individual who already knows how to be wise. Like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, Solomon already has wisdom, but only lacks a diploma, only lacks God's recognition. Instead, knowing what a very human man Solomon was as King, what the Scripture emphasizes, is that honoring the covenant with David, God chose to reveal God-self to him. God is the initiator in this relationship, and given the option of what he will be commit to needing in life, rather than choosing power, wealth, sex, elimination of one's enemies, Solomon chose wisdom. But that order of sequence is crucially important. Solomon was not the initiator of relationship with God. Solomon was not fully developed, with wisdom of his own learning and reasoning. Solomon was a very human man, whom God chose. God intentionally chose to reveal to Solomon God's reality, and in response Solomon chose to be subject to God, for which he was given all the blessings a king could ever desire. The whole of the 6th Chapter of John is too big to grasp as a unit, so the authors have given us pieces over 5 weeks. First with feeding the 5000 bread and not a particle is lost. Then with explaining that Jesus is the true Bread of Heaven and access to the Father. The difficulty with listening to this morning's passage without all the rest, is that it appears as though Jesus was recommending Cannibalism, to eat my flesh and drink my blood. The emphasis here is not on the flesh or blood, but on Jesus' saying it is MY Flesh and MY Blood, MY being and MY life-force that you need to take in. Martin Luther once described in a sermon to his congregation: “I wish I could get you to pray, the way my Dog goes after meat.” The point was not comparing the people of God to dogs, but that they would hunger for the word, they/we would ravenously consume their/our relationship with God. Many a great travesty took place in the Reformation. A great deal of good came as well, prior to the 1200s people recognized themselves as sinners and being sinful were not trusted to handle the Bible, the worship service was unintelligible to the people because it was chanted in Latin, there was a great deal of emphasis on magic and the buying and selling of indulgences as if buying our way into heaven. But the greatest travesty of the Reformation was that in the separation of the church, Catholic and Protestant, we divided our emphases. The Catholic Church claimed authority, and emphasized that access to God is through the Mass, through the consuming of Jesus Body and Blood. Where as the Protestant Church emphasized individual understanding, the teaching and affirming of what we choose to believe. The two together are true. In recent years, there has been a great resurgence of interest in all things spiritual. When we ask anyone, what spiritual is, they have a hard time defining it, more Bible, more Mission, the Spirit that seems lacking in W.European and N.American churches. The point is not to suddenly start doing the stuff, imitating mystical practices by reciting incantations and doing we do not understand, that again would be magic. The agony of the Protestant Church is that we placed such emphasis on cerebral understanding, that we thought we could figure out God. If we create a democratic system with a hierarchy like General Motors, if each individual follows the curriculum, we can all win, everyone can attain success. However, the point of faith in Jesus Christ was not prosperity, or even comfort with what we have and do not possess. The point of spiritual mysticism is not that you simply close your eyes and you are praying. Or that if you eat bread and drink wine and it makes you a better person. We close our eyes to focus, shutting out all distractions. Listening for God. When we break the bread, we do so aware of the brokenness in our lives and our agony at having caused this and at staying in that broken place. Would that we were not the FROZEN CHOSEN, but PASSIONATE PRAYERS, COMMITTED COMMITTEES, a people of God who come together not because it is that time of the week or month but because we are committed to God, committed to making a difference in the world, and we live our lives trying to do whatever is necessary to fulfill the other persons' needs. We emphasized last week together, that Jesus' use of the word Father is not exclusive, but explains the intimacy and love of God for humanity...this is our access to God, just as others come through the Law, or Enlightenment. But the point at which we do separate ourselves is in subjecting ourselves to God, doing whatever is needed, because God subjected God's-self, Holiness, Divinity, to be One with us.