Jesus, Jefferson, and the Embodiment of Love

“Jesus said, ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.’” John 6:56

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

August 26, 2012

Jesus gets up in the midst of the synagogue in Capernaum and announces to all gathered:  “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”  It is hard to overstate how shocking a statement this was, and is.  The words are scandalous, disgusting even.  Let’s be honest:  they sound as if they are from some primitive, cannibalistic ritual.  And in context, these words would be especially offensive to a faithful, first-century Jew, since ancient Jewish law emphatically prohibited (and still does) the drinking of any kind of blood or the eating of animal flesh while blood is still in it.  Moreover, Jesus’ claim to be the “bread of heaven” sent from the Father challenges the most basic of Jewish beliefs about the nature of God as an utterly transcendent and “wholly other” being.  Surely, God could not take on the form of a flesh and blood human being.  And what could it possibly mean for such a God to be consumed?  I don’t know about you, but I am right there with the other disciples in saying:  “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”  Talk about understatement.

Most of us, I suspect, are quite at home with Jesus the Teacher:  the wise rabbi who encourages us to love our neighbor as ourselves; to care for the poor and needy; to welcome the stranger and show hospitality to the outcast; to seek justice and promote the dignity of every human being.  But we are less comfortable, let’s confess, with the Jesus we meet in today’s reading, who provokes us with seemingly outrageous language about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  It sounds crazy.

This is the kind of text we would really rather ignore.  In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson famously did just that, by creating his own versions of the Bible, picking and choosing those texts he liked and thought were credible, while chucking the rest.  His work, completed late in his life, has come to be known as “the Jefferson Bible,” but was originally entitled “The Philosophy of Jesus Based On Extracts from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”  Jefferson’s method was to take his New Testament and literally cut out all of those verses that he believed expressed cogent moral teaching and pasted them into his book, while excising everything else, including most especially anything that smacked of the miraculous or the supernatural.  Needless to say, Jesus’ invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood was deemed to bizarre by Jefferson, and did not make his cut.

The Jesus that Jefferson preferred, and perhaps the one that most of us prefer, is Jesus the great Teacher of Virtue.  What Jefferson valued was Jesus’ morality of love and service interpreted in conformity with principles of reason.  For Jefferson, such an ethic does not require the Trinity or miracles or even the claim that Jesus was uniquely inspired by God.  Jefferson’s Jesus is a reasonable moralist:  “a man of a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind.”  In short, Mr. Jefferson's Jesus, modeled on the ideals of the Enlightenment, bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson himself.

            As much as I admire Jefferson as a statesmen and political philosopher, when it comes to biblical interpretation, I think his Bible squeezes the life out of the Jesus we encounter in the gospels, and reduces to a simple ethical code the wonder and mystery of God in Christ.  The Church has long taught, and I have come to appreciate over the course of my life, that we frequently learn the most from those biblical texts we like the least, if we take the time to wrestle patiently and thoughtfully with them. 

            So, then, let’s grapple with today’s text.  When Jesus says to his fellow Jews that he is the bread of heaven sent from the Father, and invites them to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he obviously is not expecting them to cannibalize him then and there in the temple.  That is too simple-minded and literalistic an interpretation.  Rather, using intentionally dramatic and even offensive language, Jesus is provoking his listeners to radically re-imagine who God is. 

            The Hebrew tradition had generally regarded God as a transcendent being, who gave His people the Law, the Torah, but who otherwise was an ineffable and distant mystery.  As we heard in today’s first lesson, King Solomon, following the lead of his father, David, constructed the temple in Jerusalem as the holy sanctuary where the ark containing the Ten Commandments would be kept, as a revered memorial of the divine revelation of the Law to Moses.  But, as Solomon himself admits in his prayer to God:  “even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built.”  During the time of Israel’s great kings, God remained a transcendent and mysterious reality, separate and apart from His people.

            In his teaching today, Jesus is saying something radically new about God:  namely, that God chooses not merely to reveal himself in the Law, and within the sacred walls of the Temple, but that God now chooses to inhabit the flesh and blood of humanity in the person of Jesus.  Jesus is revealing himself as the Incarnation:  God become human.  Love embodied.  God as simultaneously both transcendent and immanent.  Yes, it is paradoxical.  Yes, it is hard to fathom.  But, at bottom, what the Incarnation signifies is that God’s love for us is so profound that the Creator of the Universe freely takes on our frail human form as an act of utter solidarity with us.

            But there is more:  it is not just that God has chosen to take on the human form of Jesus.  Jesus is also telling us that our relationship to God is now changed.  God wants not merely to be “understood” and “obeyed” through the Law, as the prophets had long taught; God now wants to abide with us, and wants us to abide in Him.  God wants more than a relationship of Mosaic faithfulness, or Solomonic righteousness, or Jeffersonian rectitude. He wants a relationship of mutual and deeply personal love.  And so, the invitation to share his body and blood, through what has become the great sacrament of the Eucharist, is an invitation to participate in a meal that is the mystery of God’s solidarity with us, His love for us.  So, when Jesus asks his followers to share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, what he’s saying is:  take my whole life, and with it, nourish your bodies, your lives, your souls.

            Let me illustrate my point with two examples, one pedestrian and one much more sublime.  First the pedestrian:  I love baseball.  And I like to share my love of our national pastime with friends. While I am not always successful at engendering a love for the game in others, I have found that the best approach is not just to hand my friend a copy of the Official Rules of Baseball along with a scorebook.  Yes, these documents in some sense contain all you need to know to play the game, but a true and authentic appreciation for baseball is best had by completely immersing one’s body and soul in the game.  You need to go to Fenway, hear the roar of the crowd and the crack of the bat, smell the freshly cut infield grass, feel the leather of the ball and glove, watch the graceful movements of skilled players throwing and catching and pitching and hitting, and yes, you need to eat the hotdogs and drink the beer.  Mr. Jefferson may think it enough to read the rules and contemplate the principles of the game, but I submit (and I’m betting that Jesus is with me on this one) that you need to completely ingest the game with all your senses before you can claim to know it and love it.  Perhaps today’s gospel is suggesting that knowing and loving God is something like this.

The second example is much more serious and poignant.  Three summers ago, two young brothers in their early twenties – Stone and Holt Weeks – were tragically killed in an automobile accident as they were returning from Rice University, where they were both students, to their parents' home in Rockville.  Stone was 24 and had been a student at the high school where I served as chaplain, although he graduated from the school before I arrived and I didn’t know him well.  His brother, Holt, was 21 and a graduate of Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda.  Stone and Holt were the only children of Linton and Jan Weeks, who worshipped at my home parish, St. Columba's, where both Stone and Holt had been acolytes and enthusiastic leaders of the youth ministry.  They were, by all accounts, wonderful young men.

I was privileged to be one of several priests to officiate at a memorial service for these two young men held that summer at Washington’s National Cathedral.  Thousands of friends and family were on hand.  We celebrated the lives of Stone and Holt, we heard wonderful and funny stories about their childhood, we sang their favorite songs, we recalled their gifts and talents, we prayed for their souls, and, perhaps hardest of all, we grieved with their parents over the loss of their only children.

There was much that was beautiful and memorable about that memorial service, but the single most powerful moment came not in the eulogies, as eloquent as they were; or the music, as beautiful as it was; or the sermon, as graceful as it was.  The most powerful moment was when we silently transitioned from the liturgy of the word to the liturgy of the Eucharist. 

With thousands of mourners filling nearly every seat in the Cathedral, we lived out the sacrament of the Eucharist the way we always do, the way Christians have for thousands of years, in churches throughout this world.  We quietly greeted one another with hugs, kisses, and compassionate glances in the exchange of God's peace, and then we gathered around the table with the bread and the cup and re-enacted our central story:  The story of a God who loves us so much that He will not have us suffer this world's evils alone; the story of a God who takes all of our pain, anguish, grief, worries and fears upon himself; the story of a God whose broken body has become the bread that feeds us; the story of a God who does not let death have the last word, but who overcomes it; the story of a God who promises to deliver us from this broken world, to wipe away every tear, and to make all things new. 

Where words and reason failed us on that Sunday, the mystery of sharing the bread and the cup held us up, held us together, and gave us hope.  With all respect, this is the Jesus that Mr. Jefferson, in all his wisdom, just did not get.

Amen.

Wishing for Wisdom

“’Give your servant therefore an understanding mind . . . .’" 1 Kings 3:9

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

August 19, 2012

            We live in an age in which it is easy to be overwhelmed.  We are a culture both saturated with information and obsessed with speed.  The titans of technology are growing bigger and faster by the minute, and equipping us with more tools than we know what to do with.  Take Google, for example.  Its stated corporate mission is outlandishly bold:  "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".  Started just a dozen years ago by some Stanford kids, you and I and other Google users around the world now conduct over 293 million Google searches per day.  That is a lot of people looking for a lot of answers.

            Or take Facebook, an information purveyor of a different sort; a so-called social network on the internet.  Started in 2004 by a couple of Harvard kids, just eight years later Facebook now has over a quarter billion registered users around the world.  And notwithstanding its recent fall from grace on the stock market, Facebook still had the third largest IPO in corporate history.  It is a sprawling cyber giant.  As the company likes to claim, if it were a country, Facebook would be the sixth largest nation in the world.  That is a lot of people reaching out for some kind of relationship with others.

            Electronic messaging is part of this overwhelming trend too:  whether we call it email, or text messages, or gchat, or ichat, or twitter, or whatever, we increasingly bombard one another with it.  Electronic text messaging did not even exist until the early 1980s.  Today nearly a trillion electronic messages are shot off each and every day around the world.  That is a lot of people trying to be heard.

            I am old enough to have lived as a young child in a house that did not have a television set and certainly had neither cell phones nor computers.  And yet the college students I now teach and pastor have grown up utterly immersed in all of this technology.  The experts tell us that by the time a person is 21 years old today, she has watched over 20,000 hours of television, spent over 10,000 hours on cell phones, and sent more than 250,000 electronic messages of one sort or another. 

            There is no sign of this pace slowing down.  Just the opposite.  The flow of information is increasing exponentially.  Information technology experts say that the total volume of technical information and data in cyberspace is doubling every two years.  And, they predict, in five years the volume of total information out there will be doubling every 72 hours.

             All of this is overwhelming.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not a Luddite opposed to change.  Much of it is for the good, or at least can be.  But I do wonder whether the pace of our technology and the amount of information we are generating is matched by a commensurate level of wisdom in what to do with it.  It is one thing to be smart, another thing to be wise. 

            King Solomon understood the difference.  Though he lived in a different time with different challenges, he appreciated that it isn't enough to be merely clever or resourceful or knowledgeable.  A good life requires more; it requires wisdom.  So, when asked by God in a dream what one thing Solomon might want if he could have anything he wished, Solomon replies:  wisdom.  Or, more specifically, he says that he wants an “understanding mind” coupled with “the ability to discern between good and evil.”  At least that is the way that the New Revised Standard Version translates the Hebrew.  The underlying Hebrew word, however, is more nuanced than simply an “understanding mind”; as bible scholar Eugene Peterson points out, the word could just as easily be translated as a “God-listening heart.”  What is important in the Hebrew, Peterson explains, is that the meaning of wisdom includes both the head and the heart.  The writer Gordon Jackson tries to sum up ‘wisdom’ this way:   “wisdom is the art of making good out of what life throws at us.” 

            Definitions of wisdom are, of course, only so helpful.  The real challenge is trying to cultivate wisdom in our lives.  One of my favorite Anglican theologians is David Ford, who teaches theology at Cambridge University in England.  One of Ford's major interests is helping us to recover the great wisdom tradition from our Bible so that we can apply it to our everyday lives.  Ford sees Christian wisdom as a body of beliefs, practices, disciplines, and habits of heart and mind that can help us to cope and thrive in the midst of life's many overwhelmings.

            So, where do we start in our pursuit of wisdom?  The first and most basic point, Ford says, is to remember that true wisdom begins by grounding ourselves in Jesus Christ who himself is the source of all wisdom.  The strange and wonderful truth of the gospel is that we do not start the journey toward wisdom by merely deciding to obey certain teachings, to follow our conscience, to stick to certain principles, to do our duty, to imitate good examples, or to develop virtues and good habits.  For the Christian, there is something more foundational than that:  it is the act of letting ourselves go so that we can be embraced by God in faith.  This is what Paul means in today's reading from his letter to the Ephesians when he says that to live wisely we must first let ourselves “be filled with the Spirit.”  Wisdom begins when we acknowledge that we are not in control and that our own ideas about what we should do with our lives do not come first. What comes first is our immersion in the life of the Spirit.

            Once we are grounded in a Christ-centered life of worship, prayer, and sacrament, the pursuit of true wisdom becomes possible.  It would be folly to suggest that there is any one path to wisdom, but Ford suggests at least four time-honored strategies for growing in wisdom.

            The first is to become reacquainted with the wisdom literature in the Bible.  Our Scripture's wisdom tradition is generally said to reside in the Books of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and the Psalms; but wisdom sayings and stories run throughout the historical books, the prophets, and are constantly appearing throughout the Gospels and Paul's letters.  These books contain gems of insight that seek to distill what has been learned from millenia of experience and reflection.  They are not so much recipes for action that can just be mindlessly applied to our lives.  Rather, the wisdom comes in wrestling with our own situation while continuing to meditate on these sayings and stories.  Each generation finds in them fresh and evolving learnings about giving meaningful shape to our lives before God.

            The second strategy for seeking wisdom is to practice the traditional virtues of Christian living.  St. Paul's list of the nine fruits of the Spirit in his letter to the Galatians (5:22) is perhaps the most famous summary of these virtues:  the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Our schools and academies do a wonderful job of teaching skills and substantive knowledge in traditional disciplines like math, history, English, science and the like; but we sometimes seem reluctant to embrace the teaching of virtue.   We need to be bolder about naming, describing, and practicing the virtues that form a good life.  One of the important missions of Episcopal schools and chaplaincies is precisely to fill this void:  to offer a community of teaching and learning that is not just about academics but where we are not embarrassed to share the wisdom of pursuing a virtuous life. 

            Ford's third recommendation is to seek out wise people and to belong to communities that are passionate about wisdom.  Wisdom is best learned face-to-face.  Many of us have been blessed to have wise parents, teachers, and colleagues; but even if we haven't been privileged in that way, there are opportunities in parish life, in spiritual direction, in book clubs, and in friendships of all kinds for growing in wisdom.  Because wisdom is so much a matter of making the deep connections in the midst of the complexities of life, there is no substitute for seeing how someone else does it.  The hard part is to be intentional about forming and maintaining these relationships amidst the busyness of our lives.

            Finally and perhaps most importantly, Ford writes, wisdom comes from the experience of opening ourselves up to others in empathetic care.  The art of seeing and feeling and experiencing the world not just from our own perspective, but from the vantage point of the other, is central to Christian wisdom.  The great Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who suffered the fate of dying in a concentration camp because of his willingness to stand in solidarity with his Jewish brothers and sisters in the face of Hitler's evil, wrote a piece near the end of his life entitled “The View From Below.”  In that essay, Bonhoeffer argued that real wisdom emerges only from experiencing the world from the vantage point of others, most particularly those “others” in this world who are outcast or weak or vulnerable or neglected or despised.  We become a truly wiser people by living with and caring for our poor, our sick, our elderly, our children.

            One of the great ironies that I have discovered in my ministry at Harvard is that for all its academic riches, true wisdom is harder to find there than you might expect.  There are many, many brilliant people on our campus, to be sure, people who are technically intelligent in one discipline or another, and who may be creative problem-solvers; but true human wisdom seems less valued than it once was.  Once known for producing wise people like William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Helen Keller, T.S. Eliot and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harvard is today more associated with technical geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. 

            One recent exception to that trend is the late Peter Gomes.  One of my personal regrets is that I never got to know Peter before he died early last year, although I had admired his writing and preaching for some time.  While Gomes certainly had his own eccentricities and foibles, he also was a man of considerable wisdom who stood at the center of Harvard’s spiritual life for four decades.  Let me leave you with this bit of biblical wisdom from the late Peter Gomes:

 “You are asked in the time that you have on this earth to use wisely
 what you have been given for the kingdom of God.
 That means you must consider not only how you spend your time 
but how you spend your money, and how you use your talent as well. The gifts that you have do not belong to you; 
they are not yours to possess but rather they are yours to improve. . . . If you give serious consideration to this use of your talent,
 your time, and your treasure, then you will have grown in wisdom, and neither your church 
nor the whole church of Jesus Christ need ever fear; and for that let the whole church say Amen.”

Our Deepest Hunger

“Jesus said to the people, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’”  John 6:35

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

August 12, 2012

            Two years ago in March, my wife, Pat, and I led a group of high school students on a trip to South Africa.  The trip was part of a cultural exchange program between the high school I was then serving – St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland – and a small youth center in Winterveldt, South Africa by the name of Bokamoso.   It was an unforgettable trip.   We were there for about two weeks, and immersed ourselves in both the rich history and natural beauty of that great country.  We traveled to Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Soweto.  We went on a short safari in the Pilanesberg Game Reserve; we ventured down to the Cape of Good Hope; and we discovered the African penguin along the southern coast.  We also spent considerable time learning about that country’s struggles with its apartheid history, visiting Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, touring the Anglican churches that served as sanctuaries for the resistance movement, and spending time in the many settlement communities that continue to give witness to that terrible history.

            As an Episcopal school, however, we also wanted to ensure that service was an essential aspect of the trip.  So, we spent several days with our students serving the orphanage at the Bokamoso Center in Winterveldt, as well as spending a day with children suffering from AIDS in a hospital for the chronically ill run by a Roman Catholic order.  But, for me, the most memorable service project from that trip was the evening we spent with homeless and displaced refugees in Johannesburg. 

            Like most of the world’s major cities, Johannesburg has a significant homeless population.  The city’s issues with homelessness have, however, been greatly exacerbated over the last decade because of the incredible numbers of refugees entering South Africa from the neighboring states of Zimbabwe and Botswana.  Experts report that during this time as many as three million people have fled to South Africa from the north in the hope of finding a better life, and as South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg has had to cope with a large share of these refugees.  One of the largest and most active churches in the city that has stepped up to meet the needs of these displaced persons has been Central Methodist Church, a large church in the heart of downtown Johannesburg. 

            One evening we took our students to Central Methodist to learn about their programs for the homeless and to participate in one of their mobile feeding programs.  We were met in the church by one of the church’s lay leaders, a gentle man by the name of Ndai.  Ndai explains to us the city’s refugee problems and the steps the church has taken to provide shelter and services for these persons.  He tells us that because of the incredible numbers of refugees, the Church cannot accommodate them all in its facilities and has, as a result, established a mobile feeding program that seeks to deliver food to where the refugees are encamped on the outskirts of the city.  The program is a simple one, Ndai explains:  vats of soup are prepared in the church’s kitchen, loaves of bread are delivered from a nearby bakery, and when everything is ready, vans are loaded up with the food and water and then teams of volunteers go out with the vans and drive to three different locations where the refugees are waiting.

            Before we venture out in the vans, however, Ndai takes our students aside to share with them one other important aspect of the program.  “We do more than just give bread and soup and water to these people,” Ndai says, “as important as that is.”  “We also learn their names and listen to their stories.  You see,” he continues, “these people hunger for more than just bread:  they hunger for human connection.”  “So,” Ndai instructs us, in addition to feeding these people, “I want each one of you to come back at the end of the evening prepared to share with the group the name and story of at least one of the people you meet tonight.”  He assures us that many of them will know at least a little English.

            As Ndai says this, I can feel the anxiety of our students mount.  This situation is already scary enough:  here we are in a strange and frankly dangerous city half way around the world from home; we are venturing out into the shadows of the evening to parts of town that are even sketchier than where the church is located; and we are asked to serve hundreds and hundreds of total strangers from other countries who are in the most desperate of circumstances.  That seems challenging enough.  But now, we are told, we are also supposed to make friends with these strangers.

             At this point, Pat and I and the other adult chaperones are getting just as nervous as the students, since we, after all, are responsible for their safety and welfare.  But we also know that we have to put on a brave face so that our students will have the confidence to do what we have been asked.  And so, we take a deep breath, gather up our courage, lead our students into the waiting vans, and drive off into the night in teams to feed these unknown strangers.

            What we discover once we arrive at the appointed sites surprises us:  we see hundreds and hundreds of refugees quietly lined up in queues awaiting our arrival.  These are not hardened criminals or threatening runaways, but rather simple families – men, women, and children – who, as we get closer, seem just as scared as we are.  We unload the bread and soup and water and begin to feed them, and as we do, our students gradually break through their fears and begin to strike up conversations, as they are able, with those we are serving.  We come to learn that these refugees are for the most part people who, through no fault of their own, are victims of oppressive and uncaring governments.  They have left everything behind them and are merely in search of those simple things that all of us take for granted:  bread and water, a place to sleep, a bath, meaningful work, hope for their children, a future.

            After we finish our feeding ministry that night, traveling to all three of the designated refugee sites, we bring the students back to the church and form small groups so that we can share what we have experienced.  In contrast to the quiet tension in the atmosphere before we left, the students are now relaxed and talkative.  One by one, our students share the names and stories of some of the people with whom they broke bread that night.  And gradually our students begin to realize that not only bodies, but spirits, were fed that night. And not only were the refugees fed that night; but we were fed as well.

            Over these past few Sundays, we have been winding our way through the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, and listening to Jesus teach about bread and how God feeds us when we least expect it.  We have heard Jesus remind his disciples of God’s faithfulness in feeding manna to the Hebrew people during their wanderings in the wilderness.  Likewise, we have watched Jesus feed five thousand from just a few loaves of bread, creating abundance where before there was only scarcity.  And today we also hear Elijah’s famished cries of desperation answered with bread that sustains him and gives him hope where he thought there was none.

            But as we listen more deeply and more carefully to Jesus, we hear in today’s lesson something radically new.  We hear that the bread we really crave is not the bread that keeps our bodies going, for that is a bread that will not endure, just as our bodies will not endure.  No, what we really crave is a lasting connection and a permanent relationship with all that is true and beautiful and good.  Our deepest hunger is not that our bellies might be filled with the bread of this world, but that our hearts might be filled with the bread of life.  And when Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” he is assuring us that God is offering in him just such a relationship of eternal and joyful intimacy.

            Our friend, Ndai, was a wise and faithful follower of Christ.  He knew that an authentically Christian ministry to the homeless requires more than the mere delivery of bread, soup and water.  He taught our students that day in Johannesburg a core gospel truth:  that as important as it is to feed our bodies, what sustains us as God’s people is to feed each other’s spirits.  And we do that by opening our hearts to the other in loving vulnerability, just as Christ opens his heart to us. 

            And Ndai taught us something else:  it turns out that we are all refugees.  For the moment, we may have the good fortune to live in nice houses, to lie in warm beds, and to eat sumptuous foods.  But let us not kid ourselves:  these things will pass.  One day, sooner or later, we too will find ourselves standing naked and homeless before the Creator and Redeemer of all.  Let us be forever grateful to know that Ndai’s teacher, and our Lord, is there now waiting to take us in, already knowing our names and our stories, and dying to feed us a bread that will satisfy even our deepest hunger.  Amen.

           

Solidarity in Christ

“There is one body and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”  Ephesians 4:4-6

The Reverend Luther Zeigler

Emmanuel Church

August 5, 2012

            Let me begin with a confession:  I have spent more of this past week than I really should have watching the Olympics.   And I gather that I’m not alone.  The media reports that as many as a billion people around the globe watched the Opening Ceremonies, and NBC says that it is averaging around 40 million viewers in the United States alone this past week, not counting the streaming video coverage that is now available on the internet.  Indeed, as to such digital coverage, the Wall Street Journal reports that millions of American workers admit to watching the games on their computers at work to the tune of an estimated $650 million in productivity losses.  Honestly, I don’t know how reliable all these numbers are, but they certainly do point to a very real and very global fascination with the athletic performances that are taking place right now in London.

            I have long been interested in the potential of sports to promote human solidarity and community.  At its best, the drama that we call athletics has the capacity to unite people from diverse backgrounds, to break down the socially constructed barriers that separate us, to rally folks around their common humanity and the pursuit of excellence, and to ignite them with a Spirit that transcends individual circumstances.  In the Olympic stadium, we see people gathered together from all nations in wondrous awe of the heights to which the human body and spirit can soar.  The genius of Olympic team sports – where athletes are not just in it for themselves but are representing their countries – is that it shows us what is possible when the flourishing of the group depends upon individuals setting aside selfish agendas for a common purpose.  It reminds us that we are at our best as individuals when we work cooperatively in community for our collective good rather than each person seeking his or her own glory.

            The most memorable Olympic moment for me that proves this truth was not from this year’s Olympics, but from a different Olympics that took place several decades ago in Spokane, Washington.[1]  The 1976 Special Olympics to be precise.  One of the featured events from that year’s games was the 100-yard dash.  The field included nine contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, most of them children or young adults. According to eyewitness accounts, the runners took their mark at the starting line and, at the gun, they took off, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race, to the finish, and win.  All of them, that is, except one young boy, who stumbled out of the starting blocks and fell to the ground, letting out a shriek of pain and disappointment as he did. 

            The other eight runners apparently heard the boy’s scream, because all of them slowed down and looked back.  And when they saw the boy writhing in pain and embarrassment on the ground, they came to a full stop in the middle of the race, turned around and scrambled to his aid.  Every one of them.  And, according to a report from one spectator, one of the contestants, a young girl with Down's Syndrome, bent down and kissed the young boy, saying “This will make it better.”  The runners then lifted the boy to his feet, linked arms, and walked together – all nine of them, arm in arm – to the finish line.  Everyone in the stadium stood, and cheered, and cheered, and cheered.

            People who were there are still telling the story.  Why?  Because notwithstanding our intensely competitive culture, grounded as it is in an ideal of rugged individualism, we know that on that day these nine young runners embodied an ideal that transcends what we are ordinarily capable of doing.  They utterly forgot about their own aims and ambitions, eagerly setting them aside to care for someone in distress.  Indeed, the actions of these young athletes embodied precisely the kind of Christ-centeredness into which Paul invites us in today’s lesson from Ephesians:  a life marked by “humility and gentleness,” by “patience,” by “bearing with one another in love,” with the goal of “making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”  In Christ, we are not separate individuals pursuing our own gain, but brothers and sisters united in “one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.”

            I am not so naïve or sentimental as to think that we can replicate this kind of selfless devotion to the other easily or consistently or even often in our own day-to-day lives.  But I also know that as soon as we give up on this as our ideal, and give into the world’s cynicism and self-centeredness, we are lost.  Which is exactly why we show up here in church every Sunday:  to hear again the story of God’s ultimate act of self-giving love in Christ, to pray that God will open our hearts to such love, and to support each other in trying to grow into what St. Paul calls “the measure of the full stature of Christ.”  It is a heady ideal, to be sure, one that is possible only by virtue of the mystery of God’s grace secretly at work in each one of us.  But the reason the Church is here is to “build up the body of Christ” as best we are able.  And one of ways we do that is to be a place where when people fall – and we all will fall – there is somebody to pick us up.

            This is precisely the kind of Christ-centered life, and the kind of Christ-centered community, into which we welcome little Skylar Rothe today.  Skylar’s baptism is more than a momentary event; it is the beginning of a lifelong pilgrimage in relationship with God.  On that pilgrimage Skylar will have a guide in Christ, who is constantly by her side.  But Christ also relies on those who are closest to Skylar, her parents and godparents.  Brian and Rachel, Randal and Nancy, God is counting on you to show Skylar what it looks like to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.  It is an awesome responsibility, but it comes with some good news too:  Even when you mess up – and you will – God will be there to redeem your errors and straighten your path.  God only asks that you give the little bit you have, knowing that in the mystery of things it will be enough.  God does not expect you to be perfect role models for Sklyar; He expects only that you strive to be faithful ones, prepared to seek forgiveness when you make mistakes.

            And as for the rest of us here in church today, we are not only witnesses to Skylar’s baptism, but we are her brothers and sisters in Christ, and as a community we have our responsibility to help her parents and godparents guide little Skylar through the often treacherous stretches of being human in this world.  It will not always be easy going, but with God’s help, we know it will be a race well worth running.  And if there is an ESPN Olympic highlight reel that I would want to share with little Skylar to teach her about the Christian life, it would not be a clip of Lebron James leading the American basketball team toward another gold medal, or of Michael Phelps becoming the most decorated Olympian in history, or even of the American women’s gymnastics team working so beautifully together to win the gold.  Rather, it would be the film of those nine disabled children in Spokane, Washington who became true Olympians by helping each other walk arm-in-arm across the finish line in an otherwise obscure race that still has people talking.  Amen.

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            [1] As told by Fred Rogers in his 2002 Commencement Address at Dartmouth College.