Tenth Sunday of Trinity, 8th August 2021
Lectionary Readings for the Tenth Sunday of Trinity
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
John 6:35, 41-51
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven.
Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
Sermon for the Tenth Sunday of Trinity
What is it that sustains us?
What is it that sustains us?
Desert plants and animals are sustained by very little.
By inhaling carbon dioxide only at night, an agave plant can keep the opening on its leaves, called stomata, closed during the heat of the day. As an agave approaches maturity at 10 to 30 years of age it accumulates a great quantity of sugar and starch in the heart tissue. These carbohydrates provide the energy that fuels the rapid development of the inflorescence (the flowering structure, including supporting stems), which is usually massive compared to the plant that produces it. In all but a few species the rosette dies after flowering and fruiting, having spent all of its life energy to produce a huge quantity of seeds—-a monocarpic (once-fruiting) life cycle. The plants literally flower themselves to death.
The thorny devil lizard uses its entire skin as a web of drinking straws to soak up water from soggy sand. This allows it to drink with its feet and skin—very handy-– especially to a lizard with a mouth structure so specialised for eating ants that it cannot drink water directly.
Certain desert lizards are active during the hottest seasons, but move extremely rapidly over hot surfaces, stopping in cooler "islands" of shade. The legs of some types are longer, so that they absorb less surface heat while they run.
Desert jackrabbits can get by on twigs and cactus, but depend on shrubs and grasses for the water they must have. Their enormous ears, with their many blood vessels, release heat when it is resting in a cool, shady spot. As you may have noticed, the relatives of these jackrabbits, who live in cooler England, have much shorter ears.
All these creatures are sustained in the extreme conditions of what may seem to us an inhospitable, and even hostile, environment.
You might think that I have been reading up for the Quiz nights we hold for Christian Aid or Future Hope in Calcutta—organizations this congregation supports: my worst Quiz categories being science, sports, and British popular culture! But no, I wanted to make a point about what it is that sustains us—-us human beings. We have been given a rich Garden of Eden of an earth—-an environment of plenty. Not that we are not quickly making it into a desert….
Human beings have been physically sustained in conditions of great adversity—of captivity, of being lost in the desert, of Robinson Crusoe after shipwreck. You can think of other stories you have heard.
But what is it that sustains us in our deepest depths, our souls? That part of us that needs not just food and water and some general amount of exercise, but that part of us that needs something more, at a different level, entirely?
…through all the events of our lives—-those things we encounter along the way of the life we are given to live. The challenges, the disappointments; suffering. But also the unexpected meetings with others who come to keep us company, to mentor us and inspire us, to help us perceive what we, alone, would have missed.
God is this beautiful sustaining power of the universe,—-this undergirding power of love that sustains us and holds us up. This receptive, beneficent love underlies everything—-the lives of agave, of lizards, of jackrabbits, of us, flawed and failing human creatures that we are.
I will read you a few lines from Francis Spufford’s brilliant book, Unapologetic, that a group of us in the congregation are reading together: “I think that…the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. …that love keeps it in being….the universe is its own thing, integral, reliable, coherent, not Swiss-cheesed with irrationality or whimsical exceptions, and at the same time is never abandoned, not a single quark, proton, atom, molecule, cell, creature, continent, planet, star, cluster, galaxy, diverging metaversal timeline of it.
….God, the ground of our being, as Paul puts it.”
We don’t have to wait for anyone, or anything, to come and give us what we need.
God is already there. Here. It is only for us see and to hear Him who is already present. I think that there are two ways to more clearly apprehend this God that awaits us: in our silence and in our common worship—-our worship in a congregation, with one another. These ways do not cancel each other out; they are necessary to one another.
You cannot be fully receptive to the presence of God without both, I think.
Because this God who loves us as the very ground of our Being both speaks to us in silence and awaits our response as his gathered people. How can we respond other than with our prayer and our praise?
And Jesus?
Jesus said, in our passage for today from John: No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.
We come back to this astounding claim that Jesus made to his contemporaries, that he was the very God in the flesh, and that only by eating of this bread WHICH HE IS will persons be able to live forever, to have that sustenance that will last through this life to the life beyond that awaits us. The ultimate sustenance we are given, as Christians, is the very person of Christ.
We have been given from God’s own hand what will sustain us all the way through. The living word that is the living Christ. He is the very embodiment of God, this Christ who constituted the community that carries his witness of God’s own reality to the ends of the earth. This is how we, as the Christian community, are to live:
Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger…. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear….Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
This is what Jesus the Christ did. This is what we are to do, responding to the gift that God has sent. The loving God who sustains us in Christ has held out to us life that never ceases to offer us the possibility of greater joy. It is full of mystery, but it is also full of joy. The goal of life is not escape suffering, in whatever way we encounter it. To be human is to suffer, as the ancient Greek philosophers noted. But also as Christ suffered, out of endless love for those he came to encounter here on this earth. To be human is also to be given, at every moment, the possibility of sharing in the suffering of others, as a sacrifice but also as a sacrament. It is as we engage in acts of love for others that we respond yes to the God who patiently waits for us. In the bread and wine of the sacrament of Holy Communion that we will shortly share here, together, we are offered a symbol of that living bread and living water that will sustain us forever.
Let us give thanks for this great gift!
Amen.
p. 20 Unapologetic, Francis Spufford, Faber and Faber, 2013
The Revd Dana English
St George’s Campden Hill
St John the Baptist Holland Road
London
August 8, 2021