Come Home for Dinner

2024-48
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 16B), August 25, 2024
Joshua 24:1-2a,14-18 ; Psalm 34:15-22 ; Ephesians 6:10-20 ; John 6:56-69



Many cat owners like me enjoy the narrative that you can’t train a cat like you can train a dog. But it’s not really true. We have trained our two cats to come home from the outdoors when we stand on the back porch and clap our hands. If they come home at mealtime, they’ll get fed. If it’s not mealtime but we want them in for some other reason, they’ll at least get a tasty treat for their obedience.

But our cats’ response is not merely Pavlovian. There are other factors at play, including the weather. If it’s after sunset on a gorgeous summer evening, the cats, knowing that we intend to keep them indoors for the night, may choose to skip dinner and not come home until morning. Sometimes a cat will even come running when we clap, only to stop midway home, meow loudly, and then turn and leap the fence again. They know they always have a choice about whether and when to come home, and we allow it.

We heard today from the Hebrew general Joshua, after the death of Moses, after the Promised Land has been conquered and divvied up among the twelve tribes of Israel. Joshua’s final act before his death is to urge the people to worship YHWH in the long run, and no other deities. In the verses we skipped over, Joshua reminds the people of the whole history of the Hebrews and all the ways that YHWH has fought on their side. After this passage, Joshua will say to the people, “Are you sure you won’t worship other gods? If you do, YHWH will destroy you!”

These are frightening words, and Joshua’s warning is explicitly tribal. The ancient understanding was that there were many gods in the supernatural pantheon, but that “our God” fights for us. To try to make this reading about monotheism—the belief that there is only one God in the universe—would be dishonest, because monotheism developed over many centuries and was still a long way off at this time. The bold claim Joshua makes is that the local deity of the Promised Land has repeatedly acted outside the Promised Land. The Hebrew god YHWH went down to Egypt and exerted power in the territory of other gods. Then YHWH guided the people to their true home.

Why wouldn’t the people remain loyal to the God who is clearly the most powerful, and who rescued them specifically? What other choice could there be? And why wouldn’t YHWH become enraged at those who still didn’t get it? But there’s always another choice. The rest of the Hebrew Bible is the story of the people’s wavering loyalties to YHWH, and an exploration of the question: “When we refuse to come home, does God punish us? And what happens after that? And how does this connect to our situation today?”

I have an important side note here. It’s all too easy for us to draw, from our knowledge of the Bible, simplistic conclusions about the present-day situation for Jews in that very same Promised Land. I don’t say much about it from the pulpit because I don’t want to minimize the immense suffering on either side. I will say that I do not support the Israeli government’s systematic victimization of the Palestinian people over the past 75 years, especially the overwhelmingly violent actions of the demonstrably corrupt Netenyahu administration. Neither do I support the brutal, nihilistic actions of Hamas as they encourage Israeli violence against their own people to achieve the goal of a homeland without Jews. I do support the hope of present-day Jews for a homeland free from violence, and I recognize that the Palestinians also have a legitimate claim on the land. The Promised Land must be shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians; no other option makes theological sense in any of these three religions, all of which are in relationship with the same God.

So now perhaps I’ve said too much and said it simplistically, but I am sincere and commit to keep learning. We have a choice every day about how we will treat the vulnerable among us, and this matters to God. Life is often characterized as a fight, for which you need to be equipped with weapons and armor. Yet we just heard in the Letter to the Ephesians that our enemies are not flesh and blood. What does armor look like in God’s domain? Truth. Right relationship. Courage to proclaim peace. Faithful living. The reassurance of God’s rescue of us. Our only weapon is the word of God, which doesn’t wound or kill, but divides truth from falsehood and ultimately reconciles. To engage in this nonviolent fight requires prayer. When we commit to love one another and even to love our enemies, this is what it looks like to come home.

For Christians, the call to come home is the sound of a dinner bell ringing. To reference last week’s readings, wisdom has spread a feast for us. Jesus invites us to chow down on his very self. But we always have a choice, and Jesus presents that choice so starkly that in today’s reading, many people choose not to take it. This teaching is too difficult; they don’t accept it, and they wander away. In the end, writes John, only twelve disciples remain—an exaggeration, to be sure, but a theologically significant one. Twelve is all Jesus needs. Twelve is still enough for a lively dinner party.

“Well,” Jesus observes, “A few of you are still here. But will you stay home for dinner? Or will you also turn and jump the fence?”

The disciples may be just as flummoxed by this teaching as those who left. The difference is that the disciples choose to hang in there even when they don’t understand. “To whom can we go?” Simon Peter plaintively responds. “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

This may sound like resignation, and on some level, maybe it is. Peter sees that there are no other options for him anymore. But with Jesus, even scarcity of options is a form of abundance—because it enables a clear decision. It’s not that there are no other gods Peter could worship—the idols of control and self-assurance may well keep tempting him. But in this moment, Peter no longer finds these gods worthy of his limited time on earth.

YHWH, revealed to him through Jesus the Messiah, requires us not to be in control—not to be self-assured. I daresay this God demands that we never quite be certain about God, because if we were, we could fool ourselves into thinking we need nothing more from God. Peter sees that the dance of uncertainty is the only honest way to engage all of life—provided that we live out our uncertainties faithfully.

This is paradox, not a contradiction. To live our lives faithfully means to risk with direction.

That phrase comes from a wonderful book I began reading this week: Camping with Kierkegaard by J. Aaron Simmons. Simmons is a philosophy professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and he’s also a Pentecostal Christian. In his book he asks this core question: “What is worthy of your finitude?” Life is a series of closing doors. How are we choosing to live our lives from one fleeting day to the next?

Simmons says this not to make us feel trapped, but to help us get real. He asks: Who is the person you are intentionally becoming? If this has never occurred to you before, could it be that you’re drifting aimlessly? Why would you do that? It’s better to keep growing into an understanding of your purpose—to dedicate yourself in faith, even though you don’t fully understand where you’re going.

As the poet Mary Oliver put it: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The difficult teaching of Jesus demands that we come home for dinner. Without nourishment, how can we handle the uncertainties all around us every day?

Jesus also says that “the flesh is useless,” which may sound as if he means that our bodies doesn’t matter. But that’s not what he means. Our bodies are a gift from God, and God has marked our bodies as holy by living through Jesus’ body. Yet a body that has died is just a body: the spirit is also necessary to make the body useful.

If you are one of the baptized, Jesus’ difficult teaching means engaging honestly with your body. Don’t just feed and live in your body. Just don’t live as your body with no awareness of your soul. Choose to live as embodied spirit. Live through your body, which Jesus feeds, physiologically and spiritually, at this dinner table.

If you are one of the baptized, Jesus’ difficult teaching means coming home to the church and then going back out again into the rest of the world: a back-and-forth dance. So many are leaving the church these days because they observe that those of us here in the church don’t have it all figured out and often mess up, or because we have failed to achieve 100% certainty. Do you wish to go away, too?

But this state of affairs isn’t new. We even hear Jesus address it today: “Among you there are some who do not believe.” Well, I have news for you: not believing doesn’t make you Judas! It makes you human.

It’s a difficult call to live through our bodies in perpetual uncertainty. Yet this is how all humans live! So where else would we go? In Jesus we find our teacher and nourisher who can relate to us because he has shared that experience. This is why only Christianity makes sense to me. How could I worship a God who makes demands on me without having participated in what I’m going through?

God knows that we always have a choice about whether and when to come home, and God allows it. But your baptism makes you part of an eternal family, where dinner is always being served. Eternal life means an embodied life in which we rise above our fears and uncertainties to serve the world in Jesus’ name.

So what kind of world do you want? Here, the Holy Spirit is helping us live into that world. Come be nurtured, fed, strengthened, sent out. Today we have all come home for dinner. Let us thank God for the gift of Jesus, for the gift of one another, and for the gift of our “one wild, precious life.” Amen.