[Propertalk] Proper 12 b

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

This is still undergoing revision ...


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY 
THE NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
2 SAMUEL 11:1-5                           			 
PROPER 12 B RCL
EPHESIANS 3:14-21		 
29th JULY, 2012
JOHN 6:1-21         						 
PSALM 14

	During the Second World War, a Church of England priest and writer 
found that he wasn’t being successful in reaching and helping teenagers 
find any lasting faith in God, a situation not totally unlike today, 
although today it extends upwards from teenagers by quite some distance. 
So J.B. Phillips began to produce a New Testament paraphrase while he 
was in a bomb shelter with members of his congregation and folk from the 
neighbourhood. It IS a paraphrase, not a translation, but it helped 
people at least come to terms with some of the content of the New 
Testament.

	In 1952, he wrote another book whose title has intrigued and gripped me 
since I first found it in the sixties. That book is “Your God is too 
small”.

	The introduction begins, “No one is ever really at ease in facing what 
we call ‘life’ and ‘death’ without a religious faith. The trouble with 
many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for 
modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of 
directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of 
bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas 
of God have remained largely static.” 1

	What was written sixty years ago still holds pretty true. We need to 
learn to think bigger.

	I don’t know what it is about us, but something seems to try to get in 
the way of our faith. The whole point of the Incarnation, however; the 
whole point of Jesus, God’s Son, being on earth as a flesh-and-blood 
human being is to show and tell us that God is interested in every 
single scrap of our lives. God cares about what’s happening to us.

	I can’t read your minds – probably a good thing! – but I’d be willing 
to bet that at least once each of us has said, “Don’t bother God with 
that. It’s way too insignificant a matter.” Similarly, I think Phillips 
was right when he said that our belief about God hasn’t kept pace with 
our capacities as twenty-first century societies. We may at least think 
to ourselves that God isn’t able to do anything about, say, a problem 
affecting this entire nation, or a continent-wide drought and famine, or 
a global epidemic.

	But why DO we think that? Why on earth would God NOT be able to and 
want to do something about it?

	This coming Friday the ECW’s monthly lunch bunch extravaganza is a 
brown bag picnic in Monteith Park. Sounds innocuous. We all bring what 
we want to eat. No one gets three-week old potato salad or an onion 
sandwich, neither of which she may like. Everyone brings what she or he 
wishes, and we sit, we talk, we enjoy the scenery and catch a little 
reasonably fresh air. But what if everyone in Albany came down at the 
same time? Make it a reasonable picture: what if one tenth of the 
population of Albany came down – maybe just the hungry ones – and looked 
at us sitting there, all of us clutching our sacks tightly to our 
chests, trying to make them look invisible, swallowing that mouthful 
hastily in case someone else might suspect that we had something to eat 
with us.

	What if someone were foolish enough to say, “Let’s feed them.”

	That’s pretty much what Jesus did.

	It’s a preposterous situation. I can imagine the folk out that day, 
looking at the restless crowd, trying to make sense of what Jesus had 
just said. I can imagine them whipping out their cell phones and calling 
the police, calling city hall, calling anyone they could think of, with 
all sorts of excuses, checking to see if they had a permit to congregate 
that way in a public park; any excuse not to try to have to deal with 
it. But Jesus said, “Let’s try to work this out ourselves. These folks 
are not out for trouble. They’re simply hungry.”

	It’s helpful to remember a couple of things about John’s Gospel.

	The first is that John doesn’t tell about the institution of The Last 
Supper, what we call “Holy Eucharist”. The word “Eucharist” means 
thanks-giving. Anyway, John doesn’t talk at all about Jesus and His 
friends sitting down, and Jesus taking Bread, taking a cup of Wine, and 
offering them as His Body and Blood, and telling the people to continue 
to do this. No, instead of that end-of-life gift, John tells us about 
different occasions when Jesus and the disciples were engaged with huge 
numbers of people, and they were so hungry – not just spiritually and 
emotionally hungry, although that was a great part of it; but they were 
physically hungry. The miracle, enacted we don’t really know how, the 
miracle was that the people were all fed and satisfied.

	That, for John, was the equivalent of Eucharist. Something 
inconceivable. Something impossible to accomplish, was brought to pass. 
Masses of people, pun intended, were fed with food that no one had ever 
experienced before. Jesus was tearing down people’s preconceptions about 
what God can and will do. So this meal which we’ll all celebrate in a 
few minutes is part of something really radical, really explosive. It’s 
designed specifically to wipe away every thought we might have about 
anything limiting God. It’s speaking to us about giving up completely 
any thought that God is too small to do something or to care about 
something.

	Notice that Jesus didn’t check anyone in the crowd for ID first. No one 
was carded, no one was profiled. Everyone was made welcome, invited to 
sit, and then fed.

	The second thing to note about how John frames this invitation to 
participate in this great banquet is that it occurs in the context of 
Passover. Each year’s Passover celebration was a sign, a reenactment of 
details of God’s miracle rescue operation.

	YOU try to move a nation, even if it was a pretty small nation at that 
time, YOU try to move a nation, with its multitude of opinions and all 
its moans and groans about having to pack and leave town in a hurry.

Nothing was too big for God to do – not taking care of the exodus or 
feeding unexpected dinner guests. Nothing was too small for God, bread 
and fish for one person at a time.

What’s the most pressing issue facing you and me this morning? Is it, 
What am I going to have for lunch? What do I need to pick up at the 
grocery store on the way home? Will I remember anything by the time I 
get out of this building this morning?

Are these important? Of course they are – especially the one about 
wondering whether our memories are going. Not being able to recall that 
you need to pick up milk on the way home may be the first sign of 
Alzheimer’s – or not. It may simply be that you were so enthused about 
the possibilities of everything you and I can accomplish that stopping 
for milk seemed insignificant.

All of this may help drop things into perspective. Not that

grocery shopping is a minor detail. That banana split you were going to 
make for dinner IS as important as calling a friend to see what’s been 
going on.

But so is the fall-out from the shooting in the cinema last week; so is 
the grief of the parents and friends. So, although we don’t hear about 
it, so is the needless death of tens of thousands of children, never 
mind adults – tens of thousands dying every day, from preventable 
causes.

There’s so much that can preoccupy us. We have access to so much 
information, from the newspaper, the phone, the radio or TV, not to 
mention via our computers. On the one hand some of what we hear and see 
is great: who won what medal in an Olympic event; whose child or 
grandchild got a longed-for job; and so on. That sort of thing we can 
handle, but the hunger, the fear, the injustice, the disasters and 
disease, they’re much tougher. However, I have good news and bad news 
about everything.

The good news is that God loves us all, that God grieves when events go 
all wrong or life collapses, that it’s God’s full desire that we live 
amicably with one another and be reconciled with those with whom we may 
disagree most seriously. The bad news, though, if I can call it that, is 
that God hopes that, somehow, we’ll rise to the occasion to do whatever 
we can to resolve whatever is causing trouble or anxiety – from what may 
seem small, such as weeding around the Church, or your neighbour’s yard, 
or even your own, to something that does indeed seem large, like the 
family crisis that came out of nowhere, and the pain or illness that 
won’t go away … and these are just things on our own doorstep. There’s 
much more to which God asks us to pay attention and to try to resolve.

Then back to good news again. Whatever the problem, God

helps us to find a way to resolve whatever burdens we may have. They may 
not disappear immediately. Maybe there will be a time of discomfort. But 
God promises that there will be a way to come to resolution. The 
Eucharist to which we come every week; the Communion into which we live 
with God, through Jesus’ Body and Blood, and with our loved ones and 
friends; these are signs that God will so fill us with words of 
reassurance and a foretaste of life with God in joy that we may listen 
to the final words in this room, the words of dismissal, and not be 
afraid to go into the parish hall, wondering whom we’re going to meet; 
not be afraid to go out into Albany, or beyond this State and country. 
These are words that should thrill us, should make us skip, knowing that 
God IS working God’s purposes out, through us! Imagine that.

Of course, the disciples were dense enough that they couldn’t connect 
the dots. They couldn’t connect feeding the multitude with the 
possibility that God would care for them as their boat was being 
swamped. Still, we shouldn’t hesitate to take on whatever troubles us or 
frightens us. We know that God IS with us.

	A priest I know, Robert Two Bulls, wrote the other day, “IN MAY 2011, I 
found myself in France, sitting with brothers of the Taizé ecumenical 
monastic community, talking about the history of my people, the Lakota.
	
	“After evening prayer, the prior, Brother Alois, invited a few of us to 
join him for supper. … The room held a small shelf filled with books, a 
few furnishings, and a table by the large window. The walls were painted 
a mango orange color that seemed to enhance the already spirit-filled 
space. The light in the room became warmer and softer as the sun set.

	“While eating we talked about many things related to the Lakota, in 
particular, and First Nations peoples in general. The brothers’ 
questions were heartfelt, and they listened intently to my every word. 
At some point during the conversation, I came to a new understanding. 
This time of breaking bread and conversation was a sacred time. It was 
Eucharist.

	“I was born and raised in South Dakota where my people, the Oglala 
Lakota, reside on the remnants of our original homeland that make up the 
Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. …

	“Like most people, I knew very little about what the Taizé community 
actually does, other than their music. I owned a collection of chants on 
CD. I’d sung a couple of chants in English during worship services over 
the years. It wasn’t until Brother John from Taizé came to Pine Ridge in 
2010, and I was asked to be his host, that their work for reconciliation 
became clearer to me. …

“With the help of the brothers from Taizé, many Lakota, Dakota, and 
others are starting to plan a great gathering centered on 
reconciliation, prayer, and music. We envision a pilgrimage made up of 
young people from all points of North America and abroad arriving 
together at the Pine Ridge Reservation, forging community, doing the 
hard work of reconciliation.

	“Taizé’s idea of reconciliation is so simple: Come together and listen 
to God. Listen in silence in the face of great hurt and great troubles. 
Listen in the great power of our young people. Begin building a deep 
communion that will nurture us all. It can be a new beginning.” 2

	The whole idea of reconciliation – and so many of the other problems of 
the world – is so complicated because it involves human relationships. 
Yet NOTHING is beyond the scope of God’s love and compassion. All that 
we need to understand is that God WILL take care of it – through us! God 
WILL feed us, now, and in a few minutes, and forever. This meal … is 
part of something really radical, really explosive.

NOTES:

1 	“Your God is too Small” by J.B. Phillips. Macmillan Paperbacks © 1961 
http://www.newchurches.com/mediafiles/YourGodisTooSmall-Phillips.pdf

2	“Come Together and Listen” by Robert Two Bulls | August 2012  The 
Lakota people of South Dakota are building bonds with the Taizé brothers 
from France. The result? Spirituality that spans the ages, and a promise 
of reconciliation.  The Rev. Canon Robert Two Bulls is the missioner of 
the Department of Indian Work and Multicultural Ministries for the 
Episcopal Church in Minnesota. He is also the vicar of All Saints Indian 
Mission in Minneapolis.


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)