Church on Morgan
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[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings inspired by the revised Common Lectionary and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] So if you're one of the few people who tends to enjoy my sermons, I'm going to just up front. This is not like the others. And this will probably be a disappointment to you. But this week as I've been kind of sitting with the text in front of us, I realized that kind of hidden in plain sight is maybe this realization or this dynamic that has probably been the most significant shift in my own faith and spirituality over the past 20 years. The thing that God has most been doing in my life, probably for the past two decades, I think is being presented to us here. And so I want to do my best to kind of excavate that, hoping that the gift that's been to me might be a gift to you. But also knowing full well, I'm going to try and name and point to something that I don't have words or language for. And it might fail. We might not get there, and that's OK. But with that in mind, would you just take a moment here in the silence to kind of open yourself up to God, whatever that might look like for you, that we might hear what God has to say to us, that I might be faithful in my sharing? Let's pray together. [INAUDIBLE] Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Lord, our rock and our redeemer, amen. Today's gospel passage comes from the book of John. Chapter 6, we'll be looking at verses 24 to 35. Here now the word of the Lord. John writes that, so when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. And when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? In Jesus' answer to them, very truly, I tell you, you're looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. This is the day after Jesus fed the 5,000. Do not work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal. And then they said to him, what must we do to perform the works of God? If Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him whom he has sent. So they said to him, well, what signs are you going to give us then so that we might see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna and the wilderness as it is written. He gave them bread from heaven to eat. And then Jesus said to them, very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it's my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. So the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. So they said to him, sir, give us this bread always. Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. And whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. This is the word of God for us, the people of God. So I found myself saying this phrase a couple times in the last week or so that we are in the dog days of summer. I don't know who put that in my head, but that's what it feels like. I've had enough of sunscreen, salt, sand. I'm good for another six months. If we could just turn the page to 70s and crisp air and cool mornings, I'm ready for it. And it's interesting because this morning, not only do I feel like in our weather calendar, we in the dog days of summer, in the lectionary, the truth is among preachers, if you caught us on a street corner this week, you would hear us whispering about being in the dog days of the lectionary. And what we meet about that is that you may know the lectionary is these kind of prescribed readings from the scriptures that the church walks through. It's on a three-year cycle. And so this morning, whether you find yourself in Italy or Hungary or South Africa or wherever, across many denominations, the whole church has gathered around these shared texts. So there's like an outline and a form to it. But these next five weeks are arguably the most difficult for a preacher. That's why we kind of refer to it as the dog days of the lectionary. Here's why. For whatever reason, the church has decided in history to put us in John's gospel in the sixth chapter for five straight weeks. And every week is just more commentary on the same idea, which is bread, right? So the first week is Jesus feeds the 5,000. And then today we show up. And those people are hungry for some more bread. And he's like, no, no, no, you want the real bread from heaven. You want me. And they're like, huh? And then next week, we'll get to like, you need to eat my body and drink my flesh. Like what? And then the fourth is five weeks of bread. And so it's like, can a preacher keep this thing going for five weeks? Thankfully, most of you only come once a month, so I'm going to be all right. But it won't change my experience of it, right? So if we're going to spend five weeks in John's gospel talking about bread, it might be helpful just to orient you a little bit to his account. So you may know that the scripture's Old Testament, New Testament, Hebrew, Greek, right? New Testament has four gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke, which all share a lot of the same content. They're referred to as the synoptics, which just means with one eye. You hear the optic in there, synoptics. The thesis is that they shared some content. They all picked up some of the same stories, and then they riffed on it. There's little nuances and differences. The difference is what I honestly makes a lot of that interesting. Matthew Mark and Luke are very similar. John, totally different bird, right? He's writing a very different account with a different perspective, with different stories. It's-- and if you came to faith kind of as an adult, or teenager, the truth is that you might have been, very likely, was recommended that as you began to read the Bible that the first book you read would be the book of John. There's good reasons for that. It's beautiful. It's a very simple sort of, in many ways, account of Jesus' life. The main reason why I think people often recommend John as the first book, though, is because throughout the entire gospel account, every chapter, someone in some form is saying, who is this guy, Jesus? Who are you? Who do you claim to be? Tell us about your identity, right? And so of all the gospels, it's the one with the most clear, direct intention of naming Jesus' identity, right? So every chapter, you will see somebody asking him, one of the disciples, one of the crowds, somebody basically going, give it to us again. Who are you, right? That's what makes it a great first book. The other upside is that Jesus answers all those questions, has no problem telling people exactly who he is. The problem is the way he answers all of their questions is always paradoxical, which is to say, no one ever understands it. So if you want to know what the gospel of John is, it's the book where no one gets it, right? So here's just kind of a couple examples. We're in chapter six, chapter two. Jesus has kind of an exchange with some of the religious leaders standing outside of this temple that took 70-some years to build, and he said, I see what you guys are up to, and I will tear this whole temple down, and I will rebuild it in three days. And they're like, this man's lost his marbles, I can't believe anyone follows him. Like, it took 70 years to build it, you think you can take it down, you also think you can rebuild it in three, he's like, these people don't get it. In the next chapter, chapter three, there's this really bright individual who comes to Jesus under the cover of Nightfall with his deep, dark questions that he has about faith and spirituality, his name's Nicodemus. And Jesus tells him, you know what's missing, all you need to do Nicodemus is you need to be born again. You need to be born again. To which Nicodemus is like, I mean, I've seen you do some wild stuff, but like, are you asking, are you telling me that I need to somehow kind of climb back inside my mother? And it's just like these people aren't getting it. A chapter four, Jesus sits down at a well, asks a woman for a drink, she starts to give him a drink and then he pulls a little Jedi moment on her and says, you know, if you knew who you were talking to, you would have actually asked me for a drink. And she's like, why? He's like, well, because the water that you're offering me is great, thank you, I appreciate it, but I'll be thirsty in, you know, two to three hours. The water I could give you, you would never thirst again. And she's like, can I have that water, please? And we're like these people, they just, they never get it. This is John's account over and over and over again, people not getting it. So much so, I think it's important that we hear this morning that on the cross, the few words that we hear of Jesus in his last dying breath, the ones that were about us, humanity, people were this, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're doing. These are people who do not get it. And so this week we find ourselves in chapter six, folks are hungry looking for bread. Jesus says, there's bread from heaven that you will never hunger again. And they go, sir, we would like some of that bread to which he says, I am that bread. They don't get it. And here's kind of what I wanna like start to tease out a little bit is that for most of my life when I read these stories, when I preach about these stories, there's like an internal like chuckle, right? Like I'm not saying I'm laughing out loud while I'm reading these texts or something like that funny, but there's something about it that just always feels like dramatic, laughable, comedic at how much these people don't get it. I mean, how do they not see that he's like the second Elijah, the second Moses, he's just doing what they did in the other, right? And what happens slowly, surely, is to start to feel a little bit superior about my own faith, my own spirituality. I go, you know, if I had lived at that time, I would have nailed this. I don't understand what these knuckleheads, I mean, I suppose maybe our brains have just developed over 2000 years that we get what they can't seem to get. While nobody in John's gospel ever seems to get it, we sure don't have a problem getting it, right? I mean, my entire feed is full of people who understand God, who are speaking on behalf of God to the people who don't get it. So let me just, I don't know, here, I'm sure you're as enlightened as I am. So we'll just, first few verses of John's gospel. Here's how he opens the great book that we offer to people who've been a Christian for 30 seconds, first verse. In the beginning was the word. Gotcha, following, okay. And the word was with God, still with us, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Ready to break that down? Everybody tracking? Well, okay, let's, how about this? We'll go to our creed, the foundation of our faith. These are the first simple things you need to understand. This is what we invite our 12 and 13 year olds to kind of declare their faith in. I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, got it. The only begotten son of God, I think I'm with you. Born of the Father before all the ages. God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made. I think we can all agree that's an important distinction. Consubstantial with the Father, of course, right? It's like, there's a part of me that just, I think it's fair right out the gate to say, whatever it is that has led us to believe that it's a reasonable thing to think you can understand God, get over top of divinity, is a pretty strong claim that the God of all creation, the foundation of our existence, the one who is being eternal, just the word eternal, will wig me out at certain hours of the day, right? That we can go, sure, got it, right? That makes sense. I've seen that before. I think it's fair for us to recognize in the face of divinity that like we might not fully understand it or get it as much as we claim to. But we're modern, Western, fluent individuals. And so we have a right to understand everything, right? I mean, I think it's in the Declaration of Independence. We have a right to understand which is why I'm here, right? I'm here having mastered divinity. That's the name of my title, that's the degree I have. I've mastered divinity. I'm here to pick up these 2,000 year old ancient texts written in a language that I do not speak or read and to make them accessible to you so that we might all get it, typically via two to three clever insights and a sticky story. In essence, every Sunday, while I stand here, what I say in many ways is now friends, what Jesus was trying to say was, can you hear this? If Jesus was as good of a communicator as I am, what he would have told you is, (audience laughing) right? Just sit with that for a second. Like not too long or I'll lose my job, but like, (audience laughing) I saw this quote from Tim Keller this week. If you don't know who Tim Keller was, he led a beautiful church in New York City and for the last half of the 20th century, he was kind of considered to be Evangelical's answer man for the world. His congregation was largely the NYU set, right? These were folks who were cultured and had sophisticated rebuttals and questions and they came to redeem her to hear Tim Keller answer them, right? And Tim, and who has been so helpful to me, I've probably got 20 of his books on my shelf, right? One of the clearest thinkers and communicators of the gospel that I've ever come across. Tim Keller, I bumped into this quote this week where he said, "You know, Christians and non-Christians "have the exact same problem, "which is they think they understand Christianity." Christians and non-Christians, according to Tim Keller, the answer man is that they think they understand Christianity. In fact, he would do this exercise when he would be training pastors and get him in a room and they obviously hadn't read this quote yet. And so he would say to them, "You know your job is to preach and proclaim the gospel. "Do you understand the gospel? "How many of you, "what percentage of the gospel do you think you understand, "believe that you understand? "Are you equipped to be doing the work that you're doing?" And more often than not, kind of the silent and sometimes even spoken response would be something among these educated clergy who'd been doing this for years to be like, "You know, I feel like I probably understand "about 90% of the gospel." To which Tim Keller would say, "My hunch is I understand 10% maybe, probably less." Right? Like, it's a strange thing to think that we deserve and can and should understand and therefore speak for and defend who God is. Here's what I'm kind of walking towards. What if, what if getting it, what if getting it, understanding it, what if that's not the point of this whole thing? What if getting it isn't the point? I mean, Jesus seems pretty comfortable with confusion. Right? As one charitable commentator put it this week, he had a thick style of communication, which is a way of saying like, his students weren't passing the test. They weren't getting A's. More often than not, they did not understand what he was saying. Right? Jesus seems to be comfortable with our confusion, with the disciples' confusion. What if faith isn't fundamentally, ultimately about comprehension? What if God didn't come in the flesh to live among us, to give us a good and pure theology? Or let's just keep going, ideology. What if that isn't the point of this whole thing? And if you feel yourself tightening up in your chair, that's appropriate. That's a scandalous question to ask, especially for those of us who've been brought up in kind of evangelical Protestant Christianity. I mean, this has been for me, this is the like Copernican revolution in my soul over the last 20 years. I once thought that this was the center of the universe and of my faith, like they once thought the earth was the center of the universe, only to find out it was the sun. For me, everything I've ever been told, everything I've ever experienced is that comprehension, understanding, knowing, getting who God is and being able to repeat it back to someone else well was the point. It's the operating system that the whole thing runs on. I mean, what else is church right now? Let's be honest, for many of us, and at least has been in previous iterations for me, if not kind of a spiritual TED conference, right? Are we not just trying to, did you not show up today to hear some new, fresh, good ideas that we should spread in the world? It's not the center of this thing, somebody pedaling an idea, that the thing most important is an idea. Think about it this way, what's the highest value in a preacher or a pastor? What do congregations want? They want a good idea peddler. The better you are at communicating, the gospel and communicating it clearly, the more prospects you will have in this line of work. In fact, when I was in Texas as a youth pastor 20 years ago, I think about this now and it's like laughable to me. I was 23 years old serving like hundreds of high school students. And like, it was just in the water that one of the expectations, one of the favorite things to do in youth group was to take these overly educated, bright young suburban students, put them in a room, put a 23 year old pastor on a stage with a stool and a microphone and go, tonight we're just doing questions and answers, hit 'em. And then I would go, watch. And we would all just sit back like the Olympics and go, he's got promise, but he's no Tim Keller, you know? There's just this kind of like, this was the test. So your content, it's the ideas, how good are your ideas? How good can you communicate 'em? It's also why many of you in the room, you feel like, man, I sure feel drawn to this, to the space, to this community, to this story, to this life, but like, I just, I don't know enough. Like, I didn't read all those books they read. I didn't grow up in those church. I didn't go to confirmation. I've never been a part of a Bethmore study. I don't, I don't even know who she is. I, I, he keeps talking about this guy, Tim Keller, right? There's just this sense of like, I guess I'm not like a good Christian 'cause I don't like, I can't be 'cause I don't know the right stuff. And the truth is the reason you feel that way is because we told you that. When you showed up to church and you were new, we were like, we got a remedial student here, guys. And we're gonna have to put 'em on a fast track. And it'll look like six Sundays in a row in the evening and a book by C.S. Lewis. And by the end, we think we can maybe get you into the beginners class on your way around these bases to catch up with the rest of us. Your, your few grades below where you need to be on your spiritual journey. But if we give you enough information and ideas, you too will be able to get it, get God, understand God the way we understand God. To, to say that that's not the center, I mean, the Christian publishing industry, make, last year was $700 million in revenue and every year it grows. Which is to say there, we just keep going, we're just a couple of books away. Like we just, if that person would write the book on that thing, I think we could, we could really get to the bottom of this. There's this insatiable appetite built in. So here just tease this out with me for two seconds. And I know I need to like pick up a page here. If, if the center of our faith is comprehension and understanding some idea, then don't you think Jesus would have just lectured us instead of giving us parables and stories. I mean, Jesus just, are we just all kind of agreeing that he's just a poor communicator? But besides that, he was like the Son of God, you know? (congregation laughing) Is that what we're working with? Secondarily, like if, if comprehension was the center idea, if it was the W for our faith, then wouldn't the center of our faith be a book? Which some of you are like, isn't it? It's not, it's Jesus, right? Like the center tether of our life is not a book, it's a person. And the fact that we're confused kind of makes my point. If, if comprehension's the center, let's just make it really honest here for a second. If getting it is the point of your faith, then the saints among us are those with the highest IQ who've spent the most time studying God at the right institutions. And there's no real place for the cognitively impaired in this story, in this family, in this movement. Some of you, I think, feel like I want to be a Christian, I think, I want to, I want to lean in. I want to join this crew. I just feel like I don't understand enough. The church fathers said it this way, that the Christian life, and this comes from Augustine, and then later Anselm in the 10th century, but they said that our life that we've been invited to is faith, and you could substitute the word trust there, is faith seeking understanding. The order of operation is trust, and then a lifetime of getting little scraps here and there along the way. If you are sitting in a position going, as soon as I understand this thing, I think I'd like to be baptized. You will never be baptized, right? As soon as I understand this thing, I'd like to commit my life to this way of being, it's not how it works, it's how we assume it works, but it's not what this is about. And so I can imagine some of us in the room right now are like, this sounds pretty like anti-intellectual, right? And it's not. Jesus keeps teaching, he keeps fielding the questions, he keeps compassionately listening and offering replies, but in every single reply what you will see is that he will do something to remind you that you can't relate to this God with your mind alone. He'll just keep saying, I'm not gonna only play in that court, you can't keep me in that box. I hear your intellectual question, now I'm gonna talk to you about your gut, right? To which people like me are like, this is so difficult. I am good at the idea part. I struggle with like, I'm a remedial student when it comes to gut, right? This, he's trying to pull us into our hearts, into our intuition, into these other places, and Jesus just keeps saying like, until you allow that to happen, until you relate to me in ways beyond just your thinking, you won't ever actually really know me. The invitation that Jesus makes again and again, and we see most clearly here in John 6 is, and this is where I had to spend 20 minutes to tell you this very weird thing. He is saying, I'm inviting you into something more intimate. I'm fine with you thinking about me, but I'm inviting you to feed on me. I'm inviting you to bring every hunger you have in this life to me. You're hunger for belonging, you're hunger for love, you're hunger for feeling seen. Jesus is saying like, understanding is great, sustenance, even better. Another way I'd say is I don't, it's not that God isn't interested in helping us think rightly, but I do think God's less interested in giving us a thought, theology, is God isn't giving us God's very self. This is how I'm becoming a mystic. That's why at Church of Morgan, this is why this has become so moving to me. And so central, at the center of our life together, is this table where we experience God through eating bread, sharing a meal, and it's not a teaching. Most of my life, the center of our time was an idea. Here, it's this weird thing of eating God together. I've told you this story before. It's one of my favorites. I promise to put it in the vault for five more years after this version. But more is Sendak who wrote where the wild things are. It's like one of the greatest children's books, it's part of what I miss about having really little kids. Famously got this fan letter from a small boy who wrote them, just kind of said, you're my favorite author. I love where the wild things are, like bro, you know, whatever. And Maurice gets that letter. And in the kind of wildest, most gracious, generous kind of behavior replies. You write a note to that little boy telling him thank you and it means the world to me and the rest. And then he draws him a custom piece of artwork on the note. And so the fateful day comes from the mothers out at the mailbox, opens the mailbox, sees the envelope, opens it and realizes, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And so she goes into the dining room, she gets her son, says you are not going to believe it, but you got a handwritten note from your favorite author. And he's like, no way, let me see it. So she opens up the letter, she hands it to him, and he sits there and he reads the letter and then he looks at the image that Maurice Sendak had drawn just for him. And he immediately crumples it up and eats it. And the mother, not knowing what to do, writes Maurice back and says you are not going to believe this, but my son got that letter, absolutely loved it, and then he ate it, to which he replied, it's the highest compliment I've ever received. It's not just a little boy who did that, one of the prophets in the Old Testament did the exact same thing. Standing in front of the people, he took the scroll, he literally took the scriptures and he's like, I don't think you understand. And then the greatest sort of like strong man, feet and church, and there's been some in youth ministry, but he eats the scroll in front of the people. We're after something deeper. There's a hunger and a drive that's more than just arranging some philosophies in your head. There's a God who wants to relate to us in a more profound way. Don't settle for just thinking about God. John Calvin, who us Methodists don't tend to quote a whole lot, but he is sort of the goat of answer men and Christian story. In fact, all those who kind of come behind him, even to this day, tend to have the best answers in the Christian market. So if you got like reformed Calvin as friends and you're after answers, I would point you in their direction. I got some good ones, they're pretty clear and tight. But he once was talking to a room of clergy and training them. This is a guy who'd written thousands of pages on the nature of God and who God is. And one of the clergy said to him, Mr. Calvin, can you explain to us the Eucharist? Can you explain to us communion? And John Calvin, the answer guy, replied to him, I would rather experience it than understand it. Friends, my hope for us this week, isn't that you would live under the arrogant assumption that you might understand God, but that you'd hear the lavish, gracious invitation to experience God. And it's out of that experience that you'd have the joy of small bits of knowing every day of your life. May it be true in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. - Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [ Silence ]