[all are welcome] let us/let us build a house/a house where love can dwell

The gathering hymn this morning is "All Are Welcome." It is #641 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (c)2006. It can be found in the section of hymns categorized as being about "Community in Christ." It was written and scored by Marty Haugen. Words and music are (c) 1994. Here are the lyrics if you want to follow along at home.

So, a couple of words about this hymn. One, it was cited at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America [ELCA]'s Churchwide Assembly in 2009 as an argument in favor of the pro-lgb* resolutions (the issues on the table were ordination and marriage), and two, we sang it at my home church to celebrate the passage of those resolutions and three, we sing it at my home church as often as we can get away with it. It's a pretty great hymn.

*t intentionally left off; trans issues weren't addressed at Churchwide

It starts like this:

Let us build a house where love can dwell

The hymn is in the imperative voice. But it's a special kind of imperative. It's the kind of imperative with which people say, "Let's be friends." "Let's get married." "Let's start trying for a baby."

It's the kind of imperative to which the implicit answer is, "Yes. Let's." Let us do that thing that sounds so good when you put it like that. In fact, it reminds me a bit of this image from Baptized, We Live: Lutheranism as a Way of Life written and illustrated by Daniel Erlander:


[image shows a priest in chasuble and alb and a nun in habit and wimple. She wears a cross necklace and a rosary dangles from her waist. The priest's hand is open and reaches to the nun. The nuns hands aren't visible. He says, "Would you help me set up a Lutheran parsonage?" She says, "I thought you'd never ask."]

The priest is, in fact, saying, "Let us build a house where love can dwell," and the nun answers, "Yes. Let's."

When we sing "All Are Welcome," we are the singers and the sung-to. We are the speakers and the one addressed. This hymn, like many in the section of the hymnal labeled "Community in Christ," takes advantage of the core reality of the genre hymn -- a hymn is meant to be sung by a congregation of the faithful. When we sing we sing each one to each other, reminding ourselves of our stories, our beliefs, our call, our relationship with each other. All hymns do this; hymns like this one do so textually. The primary meanings in this hymn can be found by understanding the words as being sung by and to members of a Christian community. The hymn is, in fact, very like a vision statement for a church -- we will do this thing (we will build a house where love can dwell; this is what it will look like). The imperative tone offers a gentle, ready challenge -- Let us. Yes, let's.

Because this is a sacred text, though, both speaker and hearer may also be understood as God. In some hymns (e.g., "I Was There To Hear Your Borning Cry,") the image of the Divine Speaker and the human speaker are deliberately confused, tangled, become metaphors for each other. Nothing so complicated happens here, and yet -- this hymn is meant to be sung in a worship service in which the Holy Spirit has been invoked, and She is, in fact, the Master Builder. Any Christian project has implicit in its conception the participation of the Holy Spirit; without Her guidance we and all our projects are doomed to futility.

And just so, the words of this hymn are a gentle challenge not just from our fellow worshipers but from God. God is building a house where love can dwell, you see, and we are invited, asked, and encouraged to build that house with Him.

Let us build a house.

The house is, clearly, a church. It is also The Church. It is also the coming Kingdom of God. These meanings cannot be divorced from each other; Christian grammar demands that each layer implies the next. When we build our house, we are, in fact, building one room in a House of many rooms. But it is not an isolated building block, our house. Its relationship with the rest of the House is like the relationship of the various organs to a body, the relationship of all our worshipers to our church. Each different, each vital. When we build a house, we are building part of God's House, and the kitchen doesn't say, "I wish I were a roof," and the billiard room doesn't say, "I wish I were connected to the lounge via a secret passage!" All the rooms are essential and they are all connected, and in building our house, we build up the House.

Let us build a house where love can dwell.

"Love" here is not capitalized. That doesn't mean it's not a metaphor for God, though. God is love. When we build a house where love can dwell, we build a place where God can dwell. But this is a dwelling-place for God conceptualized differently from the Holy of Holies or any cathedral you have seen. The important thing about this house is not how much gilt adorns its pillars. This will only be a house where God can dwell inasmuch as it is a house where love, plain, uncapitalized, everyday love, can also dwell.

Yeah, uncapitalized love is really a sacrament of capitalized Love. It is one of the ways God chooses to make Godself known to us. When we build a house where love can dwell, the Love of God will be present there too.

The rest of the hymn will elaborate on what it means to build a house where love can dwell, and we'll look at it together. Most of the hymn is future and/or imperative. The refrain, "All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place," is present tense declarative, and I'll talk more about what that means (as a declaration, a prophetic word, a moment of eschatological immanence) when we come around to the first refrain. I'd also like to use the five refrains to discuss concrete issues of welcome that contemporary churches face, what it takes to bring that promise into reality.

[sermon] the cancer sermon (no snazzy title)

[Sermon for the people of Abiding Peace Lutheran Church, preached 2010-07-25. Colossians 2: 6-19. Parts of this sermon have been (re)written and expanded and differ from the original proclaimed sermon.]

I don't usually use anecdotes about members of the congregation as sermon illustrations, because I was a preacher's kid and it didn't take me long to get royally tired of hearing stories about my bad behavior from the pulpit. But I am going to talk about a member of our congregation today.

Annie's not worshiping with us today, this precious little red dog, because she had this growth on her ear that turned out to be cancerous. She had surgery to remove the growth and the ear flap too, and now she's not doing so well, and her mother keeps freaking out when she sees little fatty growths on her dog's body because, let's face it --

-- growth is scary.

Paul tells the Colossians that the Body of Christ, the Church, "Grows with a growth that is from God," and that's Good News. But how do you distinguish it from the other kind of growth, the scary, creepy, insidious growth that is cancer?

That's the fear, right? If we grow, if we change, if the church shifts, maybe we won't be the Body of Christ anymore. Maybe we'll be a tumor.

Cancer is mutation. The DNA in cells mutates, and the mutated cells reproduce, and the cancer spreads and crowds out the Gospel cells.

The Body of Christ is doing its job (our job) when we're replicating the Gospel DNA at our core, spreading the Good News. There is one Gospel, but many ways to name it -- "God became flesh and dwelt among us," "In Christ we are forgiven," "Love your neighbor as yourself, and everyone is your neighbor," - and there are other articulations in word and song and art and dance and most importantly in these sacraments [touch water, bread] -- so this morning we're going to use Paul's articulation of the Gospel and remember that it points to the rest. Paul says that we died with Christ through baptism and are raised with Christ through faith in God. We are dead to sin and evil, we are not subject to death -- we are part of Christ, part of Christ's very Body. Good News. Good News indeed.

We share one Gospel the way every cell in your body shares DNA, but like DNA the Gospel is an amazing set of instructions. Each part of the Body of Christ serves the Gospel -- but we it in so many diverse ways.

So what is cancer? Cancer is anything that thwarts the Gospel, that holds at its core not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but some other message.

There are parts of the church that do not directly serve the Gospel, of course. The church is a millennia-old institution, and there is plenty of graft. If we were to go through our church we'd find plenty of paper and words and liturgy that aren't essential to the Gospel. They are beautiful and even useful, but they are not the core of our faith. We could lose the hymnal and still be Christians.

But that's fine. Or at least, that's inevitable. There are benign growths in the church, things that have been added on to the core of the Gospel that don't detract from the real work of living that Gospel. A budget, for example, is not essential. It doesn't, in itself, proclaim the Good News of our death and resurrection with Christ. But it is darned useful.

The worry comes when the mutant cells spread, when their importance overpowers the Gospel, replaces the Gospel. Paul gives us examples of cancers that threatened the church in his time --

like secular philosophy. That's something that comes into the church easily, and sometimes it's helpful. Secular feminism provided and continues to provide a powerful critique of the patriarchal institutions that inhabit Christianity -- a patriarchy that is itself cancerous, a patriarchy that seemed to be essential to the church but in fact masked the Gospel, which is a liberating word to all people.

I am a feminist. I am a big fan of secular feminism; it is one of my favorite secular philosophies. Feminism has a place in the church. But if feminism overpowers the Gospel, if the church starts spreading feminism and advocating for women's issues at the expense of being a Gospel church - then feminism has turned cancerous. It has distorted the original message of the Gospel.

Paul also gives the example of angel worship. "Angels", in Greek, are "messengers" - the same root as "evangelist," a Good-News-Bringer. There is certainly a cult of angel worship in our country, a belief in guardian angels and a delight in angel kitsch -- but there's a deeper kind of angel worship that arises when we begin worshiping the messenger instead of living the message. When we start worshiping the Bible instead of the living Word that is Christ, when we devote our energy to preserving the edifice of the church instead of living as Christ's Body -- then we are worshiping angels instead of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the angel worship has become cancerous.

So, how do we tell the difference? When our church grows -- and let me give you a hint; this period of discernment that we're in is about growth -- how do we tell?

It is important that we know what the Gospel is, and judge all things against it. If we know who we are and what we believe, then the growth that comes will be Gospel growth.

But we must be prepared to fight cancer. The treatments for cancer are painful and hurt the whole Body -- chemotherapy is poison -- and it is difficult to eradicate deep-rooted growths. We must be prepared for surgery, prepared to remove parts of the Body -- keeping in mind that these parts may be structures or institutions but never people -- people are creatures, and sinners, and redeemable, and can never be entirely cancerous.

And we must be prepared, as we examine our growths, to be surprised. Those lumps on the back of the Body of Christ? Just may be wings. Amen.

[A week after I preached this, Annie, precious little red dog, went to be with God. I assume she has both ears now, and also wings.]

[Christology] Jesus is my Girlfriend

[my usual disclaimers about being lesbian and Christian are relevant here, but perhaps most importantly and inescapably in this reflection, I am an English-speaker. While the limitation of language is, of course, part of the point, it is also worth mentioning upfront and remembering throughout: I am fluent in English and only in English.]

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing." - Luke 13:34, NRSV.

What if you never used gendered pronouns for God?

Well, if gender is a deeply ingrained marker for you, if it's part (perhaps an important part) of how you perceive people (including yourself), you might feel God was a wee bit impersonal -- a bit like the Platonic Form of a Person, maybe, without gender or sex or sexuality or skintone or eye color or an accent or affectations or mannerisms or in fact any of the things that make us people.

And perhaps if you have lived in (and still live in) a culture where "people" default to white middle-class college educated cisgendered WASPy straight men, perhaps you might envision God -- in the privacy of your own head -- as being an old white man, just like He God is depicted in so many works of visual art.

Perhaps the discipline of never using gendered pronouns for God would make your experience of God distinct, would remind you that God is transcendent, unlike us, unlike you, and you would be careful not to attribute to God your own human thoughts and feelings.

Perhaps you would adopt a discipline of using personal pronouns, of addressing God, and thus experience God not as Mother or Father or Bride or Bridegroom but as Thou, personal, intimate, and unutterably Other.

Perhaps the discipline of never gendering God would help you to find other metaphors for God: Rock, Spirit, Breath, Word, Wisdom, Flame. Perhaps you could look at that list of sexless concepts and forget that anyone, anywhere, has envisioned Wisdom as feminine or Fire as masculine.

Perhaps you know a God through meditation Who is so transcendent and other that you could not imagine gendering God anymore than you could imagine holding God's hand or kissing God or running to embrace God early in the morning in a quiet garden.

What if you never used gendered pronouns for God? What if you never used gendered metaphors for God? If God were Parent, Child, Sibling, Spouse, Monarch instead of Mother, Son, Sister, Bridegroom, Queen?

There are non-gender-specific, personal metaphors for God that are a lot more evocative than "sibling," of course -- Lover, Shepherd, Potter, Prophet.

What if you never gendered God? Perhaps your language for God would be rich and evocative, creative and nuanced, every word carefully chosen, first because of the newness of the discipline, then because of the joy of finding new ways to tell old truth. Perhaps you would become more aware of gender as a construct, of the unconscious ways we use gendered language all the time. Learning to use inclusive language is an exercise, a discipline, that renders visible the invisible and omnipresent structure of gender in our culture.

++

Noli me tangere. John 20:17, Vulgate.

This tiny scrap of scripture has been central to my spiritual and academic life (which are, by their nature, one) since I was a senior in college and writing a thesis (if the kind of theology I do -- speculative, constructive, inventive, creative, poetic, imaginative and only discursive when it can't be helped -- can rightly be anything so formal as a 'thesis') about the romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary called Magdalene.

++

So he went his way, and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglement of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbours sound the strangling of their fear and bullying round him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him, and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness. And he thought of his own mission, how he had tried to lay the compulsion of love on all men. And the old nausea came back on him. For there was no contact without a subtle attempt to inflict a compulsion. And already he had been compelled even into death. The nausea of the old wound broke out afresh, and he looked again on the world with repulsion, dreading its mean contacts. - The Man Who Died, D.H. Lawrence

Jesus asked, "Who touched me?" When all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you." But Jesus said, "Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me." - Luke 8:45-46, NRSV.

It got stuck in my heart my first semester at seminary and it won't unstick... when Jesus Sang the Stone Butch Blues:

She does not touch, learns not to touch, discovers to her horror the draining of touch, the power of touch, the healing and the scarring that is skin touching skin, daubed spittle and fingertips, aching with sensation, nerve endings and desire...

++

People have very kindly not asked me why I've suddenly become so freakish around my pronoun usage, why I sing or say "Child" and "She" or "Ze" when everyone else is saying "Son" and "He." And yet I have an instinctive defensiveness around this topic, a fictional interlocutor against whom I defend myself admirably, as if theology were a contest and not a conversation, as if I could tell you what your relationship with God looks like. That, as they say, is between you and your God.

++

I have worshiped mostly in contexts where the First and Third Persons of the Trinity are referred to with gender-neutral language most of the time, to the point where hearing "God -- He" is not just a little jarring to me.

Jesus, of course, was male.

Of course.

++

There are three ways that we understand the Body of Christ. One is female, one is male, and one is genderless.

The bread we share at the communion table is for us the Body of Christ. This bread is tangible, physical, palpable; we can feel and taste and smell it, and to us it is the very Body of Christ. It is a capital-S Sacrament of God's presence in the world. It is the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven.

The Church is the Body of Christ. She is Christ's hands and feet and voice and heart in the world. Paul explains to the Corinthians in eloquent detail how the Church -- She, we -- is Christ's Body (1 Corinthians 12:12-31).

Jesus' body was the Body of Christ. Jesus' body was male, and Jesus was resurrected: actually, physically, tangibly, literally. Jesus died, and lives again. Christ is Risen. Magdalene encountered the living Christ in the garden on Easter morning. He is risen indeed.

++

He says, "Noli me tangere."

The risen Christ is not quite the Jesus who died.

++

"Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." Matthew 25:40, NRSV.

The Second Person of the Trinity -- Son, Christ, Word, Wisdom -- is that Person Who becomes incarnate. The Incarnation was Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, God's Beloved, God's Chosen, the Word made flesh.

And Jesus was, presumably, male-bodied. Was identified as male by Jesus' contemporaries. Identified Christself, without question, as male.

So.

What?

In 1981, Rosemary Radford Reuther asked, "Can a male savior save women?" and those of us who ask it with her have been told (I assume it's not just me) that Jesus' maleness is not important, no more than Jesus' thirtyness or able-bodiedness or Semiticness or 1st-century-CEness. What is important is that Jesus was particular, scandalously particular, that God chose ONE BODY, just like each of us has one body, that Christ's humanity was, just like our humanity, particular and contingent.

In 2006, I wrote:

If Jesus was human -- and he was, fully human, subject to human temptations, emotions, and desires -- then his human particularity becomes overwhelmingly scandalous for me. If Jesus was the perfect embodiment of God's intention for humanity, if Jesus' relationship with God was one of total trust, complete obedience, and mutual confidence, then the particularities of this one human person become problematic. This one human, Jewish, aged thirty, poor, so tall, and, most troubling for me, celibate (probably) and male (definitely) knew God as no one else has. I feel in my discomfort my own gender essentialism; Douglas John Hall notes that imaging Jesus as a young white male excludes "the weak and handicapped, the old and feeble, the members of nonwhite races, and women" (490) and in a footnote describes a study of Christ images in the visual arts -- Christs of all colors, but all of them men. I find myself saying, "But of course, Jesus was male;" gender is essential for me in a way that race is not, for obvious reasons. As a white woman, I can ignore race, pretend colorblindness, but I am always aware of gender, and as a queer white woman, I am always aware of sexuality.

When James Cone says that Jesus is Black in every way that matters, that the essential point of Jesus' humanity was his identification with the oppressed, not his skin color (which of course was not "white" according to our categories), he is perhaps making a true statement about the Black experience and what it means; to say that Jesus is female, I feel, is qualitatively different and a more difficult intellectual move. The tradition informs us that the importance of Jesus' particularity is not his particular aspects -- age, sex, race, religion, sexuality or lack thereof -- but his full participation in an essential aspect of humanity. To be human is to be a particular human; no one is "human in general." Jesus cannot be identical to me, his attributes identical to mine, any more than I could be identical with my father, my sister, [or others with whom I share deep intimacy].

[...]

For black liberation theology, as for all liberation theologies, Christ identifies entirely with the oppressed and downtrodden of any society. In this connection, as a white person of privilege, I cannot begin to speak, but only listen and accept the real, physical liberation that Christ offers to the world's poorest and that is so desperately needed.

At the same time, with the imagined feminist theologian in Migliore's dialogue (pp 298-299 especially), I must supplement the discussion of economic injustice with acknowledgement and discussion of, to claim Migliore's word, "linguistic" oppression, but, moreover, the hegemonic thought patterns that color our ways of thinking God, Christ, redemption, resurrection, and the whole panoply of related concepts. At one and the same moment I accept with almost mantric faith that Jesus Christ died for me, that I am a sinner and that I am redeemed, that even at my most despairing moments I am the beloved child of a God who loves me enough to suffer with me and die for me, working a redemption that I cannot hope to understand, that the drama of Christ's passion is the story of God's love enfleshed in a human body. I believe, incredulous, confused, that Christ is Lord and savior. I believe in a gendered Jesus who was fully human and who loved God with all his heart, and a Christ beyond gender and history who loves the created world, humanity, and me enough to die for us, and I believe at the same time that there is no distinction or difference between them, so much so that I find any discussion of two natures disingenuous and confusing [...]

[Cited: Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context; Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology; James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation]

++

Why do you use gender-neutral or female pronouns for Jesus? no one has asked me.

The smorgasbord of quotations and ideas above provides context, I hope, for two answers.

1. "Inclusive language" for God frequently results in God-talk that is entirely neuter except for the male pronouns that are, unquestioningly, used for Jesus and by extension Christ*. The result is that all the pronouns used for the Godhead are male.

*I'm not entirely comfortable with using "Christ" as shorthand for "the Second Person of the Trinity," but the usage is ubiquitous and, I think, understandable to my readership. "Jesus" is "the historical Jesus," a human person who embodied Godhood; "Christ" is "the Christ of Faith," coeternal with the Creator and the Spirit, God from God, Light from Light, of one being with the Creator, the Word and Wisdom of God. The relationship between "Jesus" and "Christ" you can fill on for yourself until such time as I write a book or seven, and until then I won't ask too hard why "Anointed One" became God's middle Name.

2. Jesus' maleness has made me uncomfortable for a long time. It makes me uncomfortable because I find deep resonance in the metaphor of the Church, and the soul, as the Bride of Christ, and I am a lesbian. It makes me uncomfortable because, despite all the women who surround Jesus in the gospels, the women who provide Jesus with money and ointment and service and tears and who are the first apostles, we are still left with the image of many men and women serving one man. It makes me uncomfortable because when we speak of God without pronouns and without gender, Jesus' gender shows up more starkly still and feels indisputable, ironclad, of course.

++

But it doesn't have to be.

This is the conclusion of another paper I wrote in Fall of 2006, modified slightly:

Every writer realizes that, in recounting or writing or inventing Jesus’ words, she or he or ze changes those words and their meaning, discovers or invents or both a new Christ, responds to "Who do you say that I am?" with an answer that will never perfectly reflect the Jesus of history, who cannot be known to us, but is recounted only in stories already embroidered. We may choose, with the questers for the historical Jesus, to carefully pick out stitches in an attempt to discover the texture of the original cloth. Or, with the authors we have studied this term, we might take up our needles, choose our own threads, add our own images to those we have received, sometimes overlapping those images, sometimes discarding them, sometimes simply changing the color. We cannot know who Jesus was, but only who Jesus is, for us, today.

[visioning] words within the Word

[Background: this is a vision for my church. It's also a story about me. Writing this was a way of thinking through the kind of church I want to be a part of, and why, for Seers, our church visioning group. This version has been edited slightly a lot for public consumption.]

words within the Word: a vision for Abiding Peace


This is a girl. She's twenty-four years old, lesbian, partnered, white. She is cisgendered, which means she is not transgender or genderqueer but has given a lot of thought to this, and she is temporarily able-bodied but knows she could become disabled at any moment. She is shy. She is smart. She is a Christian and that means she believes in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ and she has grown up in the church and devoted her life to the church and loves the church more than anything in the world and is trying to translate all those "churches" to "Christ." She is growing up in Christ, she has devoted her life to Christ, she loves Christ more than anything in the world.

The Church is the Body of Christ, broken and bruised and crucified and called to Resurrected life. The church is made of disciples, called to follow the narrow way that Jesus set before us, to sell all we have and give the proceeds to the poor, to abandon everything, to risk all we own, to love the Lord our God with heart and soul and mind and strength, everything we have, everything we are. The church is made of apostles, called to share the Good News with the whole world. Kingdom come! (right now, right here!) The world is turning upside down and you are invited.

This is a girl. She's very shy. She's always shy, it's not your fault. She's so shy that she will sometimes sit with people she loves, people she trusts implicitly, and be unable to speak. She's very shy. She's so shy that social settings make her unbearably anxious, so shy that she had to call her best friend for a pep talk before the first Seers meeting, so shy that she sometimes has to write down prayer requests before she voices them aloud. This girl lives on the furthest I end of the Introvert-Extravert scale.

This is a girl who can't say this without writing it down.

My beloved friends in Christ,

I can't think about the future without thinking about the past -- my past, our past -- and the present -- our present -- and my future -- and ours.

I speak for myself, as I dream about our future.

In the beginning, God created the world,

I was born twenty-four years ago, in Massachusetts.

and it was good.

My parents were American Baptists, so I wasn't baptized as an infant.

In the beginning, God brooded over the face of the deep, separated the waters into sea and sky, birthed the world into being.

But I was raised in the church.

Since the beginning of history, people have brought praise to their Creator.

I spent my childhood in the church. I started Sunday school when I was three. I started taking Communion when I was four. I proposed marriage to my best friend Erik in the hallway of our church when I was six.

And history is the record of all that has happened, the stories that form the one Story that tells people who they are and who they are called to be.

Before I started school, I told time by the church year, Advent calendars and Easter bonnets.

It's the story of birth and death and rebirth, Light and darkness,

I was a child at First Baptist Church of A Typical New England Town when I first felt the urge to sob while singing "Were You There?"

the story of a God who loves the world and its inhabitants so much She breathes new life into them at the moment of death

I didn't identify as a Christian until I was in my late teens

the story of a God who loves the world so much He became incarnate in the body of a backwoods Jew for us,

but I was a Baptist and a Protestant and a church-goer since I was born.

the story of a God who loves the world so much She summons out prophets and saints and apostles and poets and visionaries and workers and martyrs and agitators and organizers and activists and disciples of every kind and temperament in every age, to be the church, the continuing Incarnation of God in His world.

It was at FBC that I learned what it was to be part of a church.

We are the Bride of Christ, the People of God, the branches to Jesus' Vine and the Body of which Christ is Head. We are the church on earth, a foretaste and forerunner and forbearer of the Kingdom of God.

When I was about six, the chair of the Board of Deacons at FBC was convicted of raping and murdering little girls.

Sometimes, the church is broken beyond fixing.

The autumn I turned eight, my family moved to New Jersey and we became part of a dually-aligned American Baptist/United Church of Christ congregation, Old First Church.

We are human and therefore broken, but we are Christians, redeemed from brokenness and called into discipleship, living in emulation of the One we call Lord.

Old First became my family.

The Church Universal is shattered and splintered, broken and in need of mending.

There my dormant talent for public speaking awakened, there I served on the worship committee, my parents served as deacons, we all served as lay readers and ushers and acolytes and occasionally guest preachers.

And yet, the Church remains the body of Christ, and each small-c church holds the potential to be a living witness to Christ's continual presence in the world.

When I was twelve, my Sunday school teacher was a smart, sarcastic, wise and wonderful lesbian Christian.

I bring my whole history, my whole life, my whole being, a full and terrifying range of emotion, into the presence of God when I go to church,

Her name was Jeane.

and I never leave church, because I am always in spiritual communion with you and always shall be.

She died when I was fourteen.

We bring our brightest joys and deepest sufferings to church, and share them in common, because we are one body, one family.

Four days before she died, Jeane was accepted into the M.Div program at Andover Newton Theological School.

All believers are called to a life of ministry, to proclaim the Good News in word and deed, in their churches and in the world.

I preached my first sermon two months after Jeane died.

But God Calls out people with extraordinary gifts to be ministers in unique ways, and for the care of local churches God Calls pastors, to lead and teach and heal and love their flocks in Her name.

Everything that is important about me, I learned at church. That I am a lesbian, and how to be an out, devout lesbian with a Call. That I am a free-thinking, seeking, searching, rational Theist in the best traditions of New England Unitarianism, and that I am invited into the ever-flowing creative dance of Trinity. That I am a Christian, born and raised, and that I am a Christian, born again, a person who has chosen that identity, heard God's call, and said yes. How to grieve, and how to be in relationship. How to be part of a family, and how to say goodbye. That people, self included, are broken and flawed and sinful, and that we are beloved children of one Father.

The Church in every time and place is called to sing new songs, to put new words to an ancient faith.

I went through confirmation class when I was fourteen and considered baptism. I wanted to use a baptismal rite from Equal Rites: Lesbian and Gay Worship, Ceremonies, and Celebrations.

We worship as we always have, bringing a joyful sacrifice of music and praise to a Living God who hears all pleas before we give them voice.

My pastor told me the rite would be more appropriate in a UU church.

We talk about God the only way we can, bound by the limitations of our language and logic, using the gestures and symbols of worship, our standing bodies, our kneeling bodies, our sitting bodies, our hands outstretched, our voices joined, the candle, the Cross, the font, the Table, to reach beyond words for the Infinite.

That's not the only reason I wasn't baptized that spring. But it's one of them.

The church embraces our whole lives, offers ritual and comfort and a truly Good Word for every moment. When we dedicate infants, baptize those who come to the font to say YES to God, bless new relationships and dissolve broken ones, offer healing to the broken and broken-hearted, mourn deaths, invent or adapt rituals to celebrate and mourn and mark new passages, we acknowledge the truth that God is present with us from before birth to after death.

In the church that I love we will all speak our own God language. We will mark passages in people's lives together, but with the language and ritual that is most appropriate for them. Some parents will dedicate their children to God and as a congregation we will pledge our support and welcome tiny new members into our family. Some children and teenagers will come to know God and express a desire to pledge their lives to Her. They will ask to be baptized, and we will baptize them with water in the name of the Triune God who was revealed in Jesus Christ. Some adults who come to our church unbaptized will come to know God and express a desire to pledge their lives to Him. They will ask to be baptized, and we will baptize them in the name of the Triune God who was revealed in Jesus Christ.

I do not believe in infant baptism.

The church is the place where our lives, our joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures and sins are transformed.

Three months after Jeane died, I came out as a lesbian

The church is commissioned to turn society upside down.

to my entire eighth grade class.

In imitation of Jesus, the church welcomes the outcast and declares a preference for the poor.

I would not recommend this to a friend.

The church is called to welcome all people in their glorious difference, to be a house of prayer for all peoples.

High school was misery. "If you don't shave your legs, no girl will ever like you, Ruth Ellen -- unless you want to be the boy?"

In the church I love, gender conformity is not in the non-existent dress code. People come to church in pajamas and prom dresses, in six inch stilettos and bare feet. Men wear jeans and t-shirts and women wear suits and ties; femmes wear our Sunday best and butches wear leather jackets.

Stage whispered to the poor sophomore boy who had a crush on me, "The girl you like is a DYKE."

The church I love is proud to be Reconciling in Christ. We wear rainbows on our signboards and website, in our pastor's stole and in our adcopy and sometimes, draped over our Cross.

Church was the place I felt safest.

The church I love is uncompromising in its welcome of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

I wasn't out to my whole church family, but I knew that if I came out, it would be okay.

The church I love is a place where coming out is celebrated, where no one hides, and no one lies. The church I love is a place where no secret is too terrible, no prayer too simple, no depth too private, to be shared. The church I love is one family, knit together in Christ.

My best friend in high school came from a Hindu family.

The church I love is a place where people of all faiths are invited, but the message proclaimed in word and song and deed is unapologetically Christian.

Everyone assumed we were dating.

The church I love is a place where I want to bring all my friends, because it brings me such joy that it overflows and begs to be shared.

My best friend from high school is the best ally I've ever had.

The church I love teaches all her members to be allies, to recognize our privileges, to learn about histories of injustice and to insert ourselves into those histories as peacemakers and prophets.

She went through hell with me, and she never once complained.

In the church I love, no one ever needs to face hell alone. When members of our body face loneliness or hunger, homelessness or abuse, freezing weather or brutal families, they are embraced with our love, our prayers, and our actions. We welcome each other into our homes, share what we have with each other, food and shelter and money and joy.

I left New Jersey for Virginia when I was fifteen. I knew I would never have another church like Old First, the church I grew up in, the church where I learned to love and grieve.

The church I love is the kind of church that people fall in love with.

In Virginia, I went to school at Mary Baldwin College and church at St. John's United Church of Christ. I was terrified of the homophobia I might find at non-UCC churches in the South.

The church I love is not a place that people attend out of terror or desperation. It's not a church that is merely the best of a lot of bad options. The church I love actively invites people to share in our life together because we want to share our joy and love with the whole world.

St. John's only celebrated communion twelve times a year, at random intervals.

The church I love shares the Eucharistic feast together as often as we can, following Jesus' instruction to do this in remembrance of him.

There was no fellowship hour at St. John's.

At the church I love, fellowship hour is an extension of worship. We use one space for business, for worship, for fellowship, to emphasize the continuity of our life together. We welcome newcomers and introduce ourselves to them. We share stories from our weeks, make plans for upcoming church business, talk about what we've learned in Sunday school and the prayer requests we've shared, critique the sermon and eat brownies, drink coffee and live, joyfully, in communion.

At St. John's, the most important holiday of the year was the Fall Supper, epic fundraiser and source of semi-friendly competition with the other local churches over who could make the best pies.

In the church I love, the most important holiday is Easter, which we celebrate every Sunday, every sunrise, with the sure knowledge that in Christ's Resurrection, God defeated sin, evil, and death forever.

For one semester, I attended the high school Sunday school class at St. John's.

In the church that I love, religious education won't be segregated by age or grade-level or baptismal status. As much as possible, we will learn together -- children and teenagers learning with adults when they are old enough to want to -- about the stories we share, the history we have, the issues that confront us. All our learning will be focused on the question of how we live our faith today.

One of the many Sunday school curricula in Jeane's classroom had a fun roleplay scenario starting, "You are protesting outside an abortion clinic."

In the church that I love, we won't use that curriculum, or any prescribed lesson plan that contradicts our belief that in Christ, God is reconciling the world to Godself and that, as the Body of Christ, we are called to be instruments of that reconciliation.

I didn't serve as a lay reader until I'd been at St. John's for over a year.

In the church that I love, people's gifts will be searched out and talents shared. People will read and sing and paint and dance and cook and count money according to the talents given them, and we will encourage each other to stand on tip-toe to reach new places, achieve new skills, find new ways to serve the God of our ancestors.

While I was attending St. John's, I went to an ecumenical Ash Wednesday service at a Lutheran church. When I got back to my dorm I crossed "Lutheran" off my list of "denominations I might join someday" because I was given wine at communion.

In the church that I love, wine and grape juice will be offered side-by-side, recognized by all to be equally valid elements. In the church that I love, I will never be pressured to drink alcohol.

I loved the pastors at St. John's, but they were a poor fit for the congregation.

In the church that I love, many dreams will blend together to create a vision-collage. Recognizing that our dreams and ideals are different, we will joyfully make sacrifices and compromises for each other, knowing that at other times, sacrifices will be made to accommodate us. Sometimes we will worship using traditional language and music, sometimes with contemporary language and music, sometimes in languages other than English. Sometimes we will worship under fluorescent lights so that all can see, and sometimes we will worship in the dimness of candlelight. Sometimes we will disagree.

Those pastors left St. John's after my sophomore year of college.

The church that I love will have a coherent vision of itself that is not dependent on the person who serves us as pastor. Loved by our pastor, yes, we will love each other with the love we are called to by our Lord.

I stopped attending St. John's a year later for reasons I won't share publicly.

In the church that I love, no one person will have the power to drive another away.

No one ever contacted me to ask why I didn't come back.

In the church that I love, every member will be loved and valued and sought after and wooed back, as God searches for a lost coin, a lost sheep, a prodigal son.

I think most people didn't even realize I was there, let alone a member of the church.

In the church that I love, everyone will be noticed and valued.

When I graduated from college, I came back home to live with my father and sister in Massachusetts. I attended First Congregational Church of Another New England Town with them. I liked that church a lot, but I didn't love it.

The church I love will be full of passionate people.

The pastor of the church I love will preach inspired sermons that speak to the heart and core of the needs of the congregation and its members.

The church that I love will have a passionate mission statement, because we will be passionate about our mission -- to share the Good News with all the world in word and deed.

The pastor at First Cong once asked me how to let GLBT people know they (we) were welcome without becoming Open and Affirming, or using words like "sexual orientation" on the website or church literature.

We will let people know they are welcome by saying, "You are welcome!" with clear, crisp words and warm, welcoming handshakes and hugs.

Children left the service for Sunday school.

Children will be invited to participate in the service as soon as they are ready, in fulfillment of our promise to nurture them in the life of faith. Children and adults will be welcomed because they are children of God, and valued for the talents they have, active and dormant, for the gifts that they bring, for the fact of their presence.

First Congregational Church UCC of Typical New England Town drew congregants from, mostly, Typical New England Town

Abiding Peace Lutheran Church draws people from all around the metro area, because it offers something unique and valuable that cannot be found elsewhere.

When I was twenty I went to seminary. When I entered I was a shy, depressed girl who knew a lot about theology. When I left, sans degree, I was a shy, depressed girl who knew a little more about theology and had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.

The church that I love will change people's lives.

When I was at Andover Netwon Theological School, I was a member of BGLANTS, the alphabet soup queer student community.

The church that I love will never be partitioned. It will never have a women's fellowship, a men's bible study, a children's choir, a gals' night out, a ladies' sewing circle, a youth group. While acknowledging that minorities and oppressed groups sometimes need safe, private spaces to regroup and be together, the ideal of the church will always be unity in Christ, where people of all ages learn from each other's experience and wisdom, where people of all ethnicities learn from each other's cultures and traditions, where people of all abilities and disabilities help each other and share their gifts.

We talked a lot at BGLANTS about how, as an Open and Affirming and Welcoming and Affirming institution, ANTS had the obligation to proclaim that welcome always, regardless of whether it was politically expedient, and to address homophobia and transphobia swiftly whenever they were encountered.

We will all learn to be allies. We will learn to recognize and acknowledge our privilege and to set aside our culturally accorded superiority and listen to each other's stories. We will learn to work for justice for all, beginning in our community, reaching for the Kingdom. We will enter the church with prejudices and -isms, and we will acknowledge them as sinful and work to repent of the injustices with which we are complicit.

There was Wednesday chapel at ANTS, different every week, divvied up among fellowship groups. I saw the many, many ways that people worship.

Some people will bring sermon callbacks from their traditions, and they will be valued. Some people will mouth off to the pastor, and they will be sternly punished. Some people will dance, and some people will sway, some people will weep, and some people will wave their arms in joy. Some people will genuflect, and bless themselves at the font, and some people will remain seated during the Gospel. Some people won't cross themselves, and some people will whisper "debts" and "debtors" or "trespasses" during the Lord's Prayer. And we will delight, knowing that God delights, in the different ways in which we bring Her praise and celebrate His presence among us.

After I dropped out of seminary, I moved to Kansas to live with my long-term girlfriend. Four months later, we visited Kansas City, she as a prospective student at a venerable Kansas City school, me as a prospective inhabitant of the city.

The church I love will be in Kansas City. We will move here from many cities and towns, both coasts of this continent, many countries. We will move away again, and still remain joined in Christ. But we will be in Kansas City, responding to the needs of this community, the cries we hear around us, the communities in this city that we can serve. We will seek ecumenical and interfaith partners in this city, join hands with non-religious political allies in this community, focus our life together in the tangible space we share.

The night before I attended Abiding Peace for the first time, I went to a terribly fancy restaurant with my !in-laws. My !mother-in-law told me, "Just wear what you're planning to wear to church tomorrow." I was way underdressed at the Peppercorn Duck in a denim skirt, but I knew I wouldn't be underdressed at my church.

The church that I love will be a place where people can always dress in the way that makes them most comfortable. No one will ever be underdressed, not on Christmas Eve, not on Easter. Some of us will wear fancy new dresses and hats, suit and tie, knee-length skirt, and some of us will wear torn jeans, and some of us will wear princess hats and Batman capes and some of us will cross-dress and some of us will be in drag and some of us will be in our pajamas and some of us will be on the way to a softball game and we will all bring worship to our God.

I'd searched online for GLBT-friendly churches in Kansas City and found two to check out first, Abiding Peace and Broadway Church. Based on our website. I made notes that Abiding Peace was in "KC, MO. Lutheran. Def. queer friendly, active. ♥." The bonus heart was because our website said, "Music is one of the ways we worship and our pianist allows our voices to shine, even if not all of us are musical... well most of us are tone deaf, but still we have a blast."

In the church I love, we will all raise our voices in song, especially those of us who are tone deaf.

We drove past Abiding Peace on Saturday, just to make sure we could find it the next morning. My !in-laws weren't convinced that it was a church, even when I pointed to the sign.

The church that I love might not look like church. We will never conflate the church building with the Church. We may move out of our storefront. We may worship in a beautiful New England style meetinghouse, have a sanctuary with gorgeous stained glass windows, meet in a warehouse or an apartment or a gigantic old mansion, but we will be the church. We will shape our worship space to the needs of the community, the practical needs of disabled and ill members, the emotional needs of people who've been hurt by churches that looked and sounded like church but didn't act like it, the theological need for the ministers and the people to worship together.

I arrived at worship that first morning about two minutes late. Pastor Donna welcomed me from the altar, then laughed, then apologized for singling me out, then led a service that was way more liturgical than I was used to. I fumbled through the bulletin, confused and awkward, and when I left church that morning I was madly, madly in love.

We go to church to touch the face of God.

I joined Abiding Peace just under a year ago. She will always be my family and my home.

Being committed to the church means being committed to its whole life: financial, spiritual, interpersonal. Discipleship is about stretching, reaching right into paradoxes and touching the truth: the Kingdom of God is coming. The Kingdom of God is already here. We are the builders, the gardeners, the day-laborers, and we can't be content, even when we're happy. We are at once filled with the joy of the Resurrection and the pain of the Crucifixion. We are heirs to great treasure, and we are citizens of a suffering world. We live in communion with each other and with God, and in that communion we feel the joys and sorrows and birthing pangs of the whole world. We have Good News that we must share. And to do that we need more bodies and more money and a bigger building..

These are my dreams for the church. Maybe the rest is just a lengthy, necessary prologue, because these would not be my dreams if I weren't me, if First Baptist and Old First and St. John's and First Cong hadn't been in my life before Abiding Peace.

Old men will see visions and young women dream dreams.

Like every one of us, I am a unique person with special, individual needs.

Church is not the place where we pretend to be well.

To be safe and accessible for me, church needs to be a place where I can lie on the floor and cuddle a puppy dog, after the service usually, but during service if I need to. Church needs to be a place where I can leave abruptly without having to make a desperate effort to catch someone's eye to say goodbye. Church needs to have a place that is private where I can go and curl up if I want to be away from people for a little while. Church needs to be a place where I can be exuberant one week and crash-landed the next. This church is a safe place for me primarily because it proclaims, from floor to rafter, that all are welcome, all are welcome, ALL are welcome here, exactly as we are.

The church I love will be accessible to people with all sorts of mental and physical and emotional illnesses and atypicality. We will have money set aside and an ASL interpreter on standby. When we choose a new worship space, wheelchair accessibility will be a priority. We will continue to be church for people whose illnesses leave them housebound, wrapping them in our prayers and bringing the Sacrament to them -- the pastor, and the rest of us too, because we are church together. The church that I love will bend and fold to welcome and envelop new members with new needs, will stretch and search to accommodate the new needs of our new members.

Right now, I spend most of my time at church. When I was working, I would come to church after work two or three times a week. I would pray, and meditate, but mostly, I come here to feel safe.

The church that I love will be accessible to all people at all times. We will leave a chapel unlocked and open for prayer at all hours -- a Bible, votive candles, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, a miniature altar -- a place where anyone in the city can come to seek and find God, to touch God's face.

I was too painfully shy to ask for a ride to the airport last Christmas -- but I got one anyway.

The church that I love will make a spiritual practice of helping one another out of our abundance. Asking for help -- for rides, for furniture, for tutoring, for computer help -- and offering goods and services -- massage, knitting lessons, an ugly but serviceable couch, a baby stroller -- "If you or anyone you know could help with that...." "If that would be useful to you or anyone you know...." will be something we do together regularly in church, like sharing joys and concerns, like sharing announcements, so that we can make real the legacy of the early church to share everything in common, to give to each other according to the needs of each.

I hold morning prayer every morning at church for a congregation that consists, if I'm lucky, of a cricket. I do it for myself, to begin my day with God, in this room that contains the memories of all the songs and hugs and Good News we have shared.

In the church that I love, we will pray together at Matins and Noon and Eventide as we are able, marking with the Hours the continual presence of God in our lives and the constancy of our communion with one another.

To get morning prayer started, I said, "Hey, Pastor Donna, can I do morning prayer?" and wrote a service.

The church that I love is already full of beautiful, creative, visionary people. The Spirit will continue to burst forth with new ideas, and people will lead ministries that they are passionate about, and other people will join those ministries, participate in those ministries. We may have a hiking group, or a knitting group. We may have a chorus, or a bell choir. A group that prepares a hot lunch for the homeless once a week, a group that creates artwork together, a group that studies AIDS and advocates for the HIV+/AIDS community in Kansas City. Fellowship groups, yes, but more. Shared ministries -- to see together the handiwork of God in nature, to create prayer shawls, to praise God with song, with service, with art, with advocacy. The church that I love will be in constant prayer of every kind.

Once, when I was an almost-teen, I biked eight miles to church because my parents were going elsewhere and wouldn't drive me. If it were up to me, I'd be at church all the time.

The church that I love would always be open. The church that I love would always be together. We'd have our meals in common, have our prayers in common, have our living space in common if it were possible. The church that I dream about is a convent/commune/cult, with one gigantic house that we share, with one central room for Sunday worship and for meals and for meetings, with smaller rooms for smaller services and meetings, bedrooms upstairs, one for everyone, because we're all introverts, here, rooms where we could put visitors up for a night -- a homeless shelter and food pantry next door -- we'd share all our meals in common with the men (and women) from the shelter -- floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a piano. And everything in common. Community garden, growing our own food? Most of us would work, because this would hella not be cheap, because of Wesley's admonition to earn as much as you can and give as much as you can -- and we'd give it to the poor, and share it with each other. And pay our pastor, because in the church that I love, Donna will be a full-time pastor, and we will all be members of the priesthood of God. And we would pray without ceasing.

...if it were up to me, I'd be at church all the time.

At the least, there would be soup suppers in Lent and evening prayer in Advent. Or an evening together every week, for food and fellowship and study. At the very least.

I am a little underwhelmed by our National Coming Out Day service.

The church that I love will observe National Coming Out Day, and Black History Month in February and Women's History Month in March and GLBTQQIA Pride in June. We'll celebrate, and pray, and name in our celebration and our prayers, our liturgies and sermons and songs, the specific welcomes that we embody.

The first time I knew that I had met a gay man was at a World AIDS Day service way back in my preteens.

The church that I love will mark days of communal mourning. We will mark World AIDS Day, and the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Yom HaShoa and the bitterness of Columbus Day. We may mark some of these in our church, and others in the broader community. Some will be mentioned only in Joys and Concerns, and others may be the cause of week-long vigils. But we will make it a spiritual practice, as a congregation, to stand in solidarity with and to mourn with communities that are oppressed.

Once upon a time, I was a sixteen year old girl in love with a church I had to leave. I thought I would never love a church like that again, that I couldn't, that no church would be family the way the church I grew up in was family.

I was wrong.

The church that I love will defy the world's expectations of what a gay church looks like, what a Lutheran church looks like, what a small church can accomplish. The church that I love will defy her members' expectations of ourselves, lifting and prodding and nudging and pushing us in the direction we're meant to go, into deeper discipleship and communion. And the church that I love will defy herself, our visions of what she must be, our dearest hopes and most closely held assumptions. Because the Church that I love is the Body of Christ, and the Holy Spirit is always breathing new life into her.

Amen.


++
Edit: Sources: "words within the Word," "proclaims from floor to rafter," and "All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place" are from our favorite Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymn, "All Are Welcome". "We come to church to touch the face of God" and "This is not the place we pretend to be well," are Pastor Donna quotations.

[sermon] Bread of Life (no snazzy title)

Preached at Abiding Peace Lutheran Church, 2009-08-02

Lectionary texts:
Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15
Ephesians 4:1-16
John 6:24-35

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the thoughts and meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

How do we talk about signs? How do we talk about sacraments? I could get out the whiteboard from the hallway and write, very clearly, "God!" "Jesus!" "Body of Christ!" "Bread of Life!" "Holy Communion!" "Church!" And that would look very pretty, but I wouldn't know what connecting symbols to put between them. An equals sign? Church=Jesus? Well, no. I took logic in college; I could put "logically equivalent," but no, that sounds worse. God is logically equivalent to the bread of life? That's not the kind of concept that describes our living, loving, life-giving God. Another logic class term: maybe, Holy Communion implies the Body of Christ.

I like that better. I like that better because it suggests the inequality between these two parts of the sign. The arrow points in one direction. Holy Communion implies the Body of Christ, but "Body of Christ," doesn't necessarily imply "Holy Communion." It is true to say that Jesus is a sacrament of God, that Jesus revealed God to us, but it would be incomplete to the point of untruthfulness to say "Jesus is God." Jesus is more than a messenger of God, more than a prophet of God, more than a sign-post saying "God is that way," -- but Jesus is also not all that we know of God. He was and is the fullest and truest revelation we have of God, but we also know God in thousands of other small-s sacraments, other words, other objects, other events, other people, that embody God and point beyond themselves to the fullness of God's self.

A sacrament is not a symbol or a metaphor or an analogy or an allegory -- it is a special kind of sign, one that we understand through our experience of it. I'm going to talk about the Bread of Life, but nothing I say will be as true a description of the Bread of Life as the act of sharing it during our communion service.

So a sacrament is a sign, and the Bread of Life is an especially potent sign for us because it is central to our life as a church. It is a sign that points in multiple directions, past and future, Godwards and us-wards, a sign that reminds us of the many meals we've shared before, the countless times that God has shared bread with God's people, the ultimate sharing that is the Body of Christ -- and it points us towards deeper truths about God's generosity and the life-giving and life-sustaining power of God's love.

The bread we share is the bread of life.

This [frosted animal crackers] is the BREAD OF LIFE. This is actually manna, and I know it doesn't look like "a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground," but when Pastor Donna and I taught our Vacation Bible School kids the story of the Exodus, we told them that this was manna, and Pastor Donna wouldn't lie, so I give you this manna, direct from God to Pastor Donna to me to you, the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.

We have to start with the bread. We have to start with the physical, tangible, edible bread that God gives us to eat. We have to start with the physical abundance in the world, enough food for everyone to be satisfied. We have to start with the story we read last week, the feeding of the multitude with five loaves and two fish; we have to start with people wandering in the desert, desperately starving for food.

We have to begin in and return to the desert because we need to eat, every day, to survive as the strong and healthy creatures that God wants us to be. We can't collect manna today and expect to be fed for a lifetime; we'll need to eat again tomorrow, and the next day. We will always be dependent on God for our physical survival and we will always need the nourishment of the Bread of Life to go on living.

We need to return to the desert because that's where we began. We need to return to the desert and experience anew, every day, the bounty of God's larder. The food we eat -- the carbs and fats and proteins that we put into our mouths -- is the Bread. Of. Life.

Jesus knew this. He knew this when he told some of the multitude, "You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you."

You know what, Jesus? It's hard to see signs when you're starving! It's hard to say a grace before meals when you desperately want to dig in, and it's hard to experience bread as a symbol of anything but bread when you don't know where your next loaf will come from.

But most of us in this room do know where our next meal is coming from, and we know something else, besides. We know what food the Son of Man will give us; we know where this story is going and what road Jesus is on. We know that, sooner or later, we'll come to the upper room and share a Passover meal with Jesus, and we know, because we've read ahead in the bulletin, that this matzoh? [raise it up before the congregation] became THE BREAD LIFE for Jesus' disciples. We know that we will share bread that is Christ's own body, that God doesn't stop at giving us a meal -- God gives us God's Own Self to eat.

There is no point at which the Bread of Life stops being bread. There is no point at which communion bread stops being physically nourishing, at which matzoh becomes dust in our mouths, at which we are eating a spiritual meal without a physical component.

I am a theologian by training and temperament and this is the point where I desperately want to explain, where I want to say "transubstantiation" and "consubstantiation" and "sacramental union" and unpack what Martin Luther meant when he said that Christ is "with, in, and under" the elements of communion.

[deep sigh]

But that would be counterproductive.

Sacraments aren't the kind of thing you explain; they are the kind of thing you experience. What I know about the Bread of Life doesn't come from a year and a half of seminary; it comes from twenty years of sharing that bread in communities like this one with families of faith like you.

In a few minutes, we will all remember together what Jesus told his disciples on the night he was betrayed; we will all say together the words of Institution and remember that Christ told us that this bread is His Body. The Passover feast that Jesus shared that night is forever a sign for us -- a powerful sign, a life-changing sign -- that God gave God's Son to save, sustain, and nourish the world for the remainder of time.

Remembering that meal also reminds us that God gives us more than matzoh and bitter herbs, the stuff of survival but not the stuff of thriving. No, God provides us the milk and honey of abundant life, and that provision, too, comes in the Body of Christ. It comes in the reminder that Jesus shared table fellowship with sinners and tax collectors, that Jesus shared a final meal and his very body with deserters and betrayers. Jesus shared fellowship, joy and laughter, jokes and stories, hard work and long, lonnnng walks with dear friends, and as we share His Body, the Bread of Life, we are invited -- no -- welcomed -- no... enticed, seduced, lured into abundant life.

"Eat your fill!" Jesus says. "There is food for all in the Kingdom. But don't be satisfied with fast food and hurried lives, with desperation, with always longing for richer foods or larger houses, for things that you can't have."

God provides the whole world with the bread of life, and all creation lives on this bread. I met a family of mold the other day that is living off bread that my partner and I left too long on the kitchen counter, and the mold seems completely satisfied with its subsistence-level existence on our -- or rather, God's -- bread.

But I think God wants something more for us.

In fact I know that God wants something more for us, because more is given in the feast we are about to share.

As we share Christ's body, we are invited to become a part of It. As we consume Christ's body and blood, we are consumed by the overwhelming love of God +, the grace of Jesus Christ, and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit. We [arms wide] are the BREAD OF LIFE.

As we read in Ephesians, we are the Body of Christ "joined and knit together by every ligament.. building ourselves up in love."

When we bless the elements, we will transform them, and they will be a sacrament for us of Christ's body. And when we share these elements, they will transform us, and we will become a sacrament of Christ's body, called to be the bread of life for the whole world.

We will be reminded that we are part of the communion of saints, living and dead, sure in the knowledge that this is the bread of life, the bread of abundant life, and the bread of eternal life. We will be be joined with God's children in other churches and in other cities and on other continents, and we will be marked with God's own seal, as Jesus was, to be the bread of life for the world.

God has done the difficult part; God has provided a bountiful harvest, food enough and wealth enough to feed the whole world and have twelve baskets -- twelve hundred baskets -- left over. It will be our job to share that food, to distribute it where it's needed most. We'll do this in one way after service, when we share a meal with our homeless friends. We do it in another way when we serve at Shalom House, and when we provide food for Northland Assistance.

But we are not just bread -- we are the bread of abundant life. Once again, God has done the diffi -- the impossible part. Jesus said, "Whoever comes to me will never be hungry." Our call as the church, the body of Christ, the Bread of Life is to make sure that that is true. Our job is to feed the world with our selves, with our bodies, with our lives -- but we have already been transformed by God for this job. We've been prepared and pampered and fed by God, and now? Now we feed our neighbors and welcome our friends and invite the world into the abundance of God's banquet, into the neverending bounty of the bread of life, the body of Christ. Amen



The hymn of the day is #496, "One Bread, One Body"