AUGUST 25, 2024, THE BIG PICTURE

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

The Big Picture

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given August 25, 2024

John 6:56-69

 

Over the course of years of preaching I know I have often said that we are all learning, as if for the first time, what it means in today’s world to follow Jesus’ Way of Love. I have said often that this Way is characterized less by doctrine and more by practice. Less by rules and more by grace. Less by belief and more by experience. But now I have to sort of contradict myself and say this:

 

What you believe does matter. In fact it matters a great deal.

 

In today’s gospel reading Jesus talks about being the bread of life, the bread from heaven. That sounds nice and metaphorical and even good-smelling. But then he says that we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. That sounds strange, and even barbaric and cannibalistic. In today’s gospel reading and indeed throughout the Gospel of John, there is talk of believing in Jesus. Jesus says that some of his many disciples do not believe in him, and then asks the twelve disciples if they, like so many others, will now drift away from him because his teachings are so difficult to understand or accept. And Peter says simply, “To whom shall we go? We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

 

 

So there it is, this talk of belief. Believing in Jesus. What does it mean? What does it mean to us? What does it mean to you? For some of us, that phrase, “believing in Jesus”, can immediately evoke an unwelcome tight feeling of having to adopt a set of doctrines we just can’t stomach, and it feels easier to just walk away from the whole thing like so many disciples did with Jesus in today’s gospel reading. For others it makes us think more deeply about who Jesus is, who Christ is, for us, and what we do believe about Christ, and why it matters.

 

To explore this question I want to take a little detour. As some of you know, my husband Jeff and daughter Carly and I just returned from canoeing the Boundary Waters. It was an amazing experience and also pretty physically rigorous at times. While we were out there we heard the story of a young woman who had been on a long trip into Quetico, the Canadian version of the Boundary Waters. The physical demands of the trip were pretty intense, maybe more than she expected, and at the beginning the woman wasn’t sure she wanted to be doing it, but they were way past any ability for her to turn around and go home. One day they were on a long portage, and she was carrying a heavy backpack when she fell. And she just kind of lost it. Thankfully she wasn’t injured but she hit a low point. Someone else from their group just sat with her compassionately until she felt she could keep going, and they said something really helpful to her, something along these lines: “Feelings are valid and real and it’s important we be able to have them and express them fully. But they aren’t the whole truth.” Apparently that insight helped her begin to shift her outlook. By the time she was finished with the trip she had profound gratitude for the whole experience.

 

That counselor’s advice had a lot of wisdom in it. That feelings aren’t the whole truth of course begs the question, what is the whole truth? What do we believe is real? What is the big picture?

 

What we believe comes up in all kinds of contexts, and it goes far beyond the teachings of Christianity. Certainly in this election year what we perceive as being real has profound implications into how we will vote, how we view and treat other people, and in our states of mind and well-being. In Twelve Step programs, an essential and early part of the process, after admitting that our lives have become unmanageable, is to “come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity,” and then decide to entrust our lives to the care of that Power. I have been told that the Quechua people of the Andes Mountains in Peru have a concept they call “inyi,” which means something like “no doubt” – to hold the intention and purpose of doing something as if the result had already happened.

 

In a sense, what we believe ends up being the ocean we are swimming in. It dictates how we perceive and experience reality, how it impacts our state of consciousness, the choices we make and the attitudes we carry. And in today’s gospel reading, when Jesus says that he is the bread of life, Jesus is inviting us to experience whatever “believing in him” means to be akin to having a good meal. To be more like being nourished than to think something intellectually. When Jesus says we must eat his flesh and drink his blood, we can rest assured he must not have meant that precisely literally because it didn’t ever literally happen. But clearly Jesus means that something is important about his real embodied experience. That his real embodied experience is what is meant to nourish us.

And that is why we at St John’s have been emphasizing so much that our embodied human existence, set in the context of the embodied material reality of this beautiful Earth, is sacred. Jesus is meant to be experienced here and now. The cosmic Christ is meant to be experienced in our own sacred and embodied lives. We are meant to be nourished by physically honoring our sacred Earth, finding the presence of God in it, seeking and serving Christ in all persons and indeed in all life. This is a panentheistic world view, in which we can find divinity in all embodied reality.

 

When the young woman fell on her portage in Quetico, she was understandably stuck in the reality of how hard the trip was, how much she was physically struggling. That was very much true and her reality. But it wasn’t the whole reality. She got in touch with something bigger and deeper. Who knows exactly what it was for her? Perhaps it was that we can do hard things. That experiencing the vast remote wilderness of the far northern reaches of water and pine trees and ancient bedrock was worth the physical challenge of traveling through it. That connecting deeply and intimately with a small group of people, of collaborating with one another in their journeys, was a reward unto itself.

 

What we believe about Jesus, and about everything else too, matters. If we truly believe that God seeks to know us physically, that God takes human form in Jesus and is embodied in all the earth to be intimate with each one of us, that in fact our own embodied lives are sacred expressions of the divine—if that is the ocean we are swimming in, how will that impact the way we treat our neighbors with their political signs on the lawn that represent beliefs different from our own?

 

For most of us there is a discrepancy between what we say we believe and what we actually experience, at least some of the time. What the disciple Peter says in today’s gospel reading is that the disciples have come to believe, and to know, that Jesus is the Holy One of God. This is a process that takes time. What have you come to believe, or to know, in your own experience, about God, about what is sacred? To borrow from the young woman’s experience in the Boundary Waters, what are the feelings and daily experiences you have been living with that can feel like the whole truth, but are only a part of it? What is the big picture you are called to embody, to experience, and to practice?

 

May these words of scripture open a portal for you into the vastness of the experience of the love of God, as you understand God today.

 

May God grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through the Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all God’s people, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

 

Now to God who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the church and in Christ to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen. – Ephesians 3:16-21

 

 

 

10am Service