Sermon preached at Christ Church, Georgetown
Washington, D.C.
August 8, 2021 / Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
John 6:35, 41-51
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
This is a sermon on the topic of Christian courage. Courage is one of those things that we think we know a lot about. It is, of course, one of the cardinal virtues, so from the time our parents or teachers first tell us to “be brave,” or we first hear a quotation of Lady MacBeth telling her husband, “screw your courage to the sticking-place,” we assume that courage involves some fortitude or sang froid which we may or may not happen to possess.[1] We assume that it means ignoring danger and soldiering blindly ahead. But courage, real courage, Christian courage is something different entirely.
So I will say something about that courage, about what it looks like in practice, and how we can cultivate it in our lives.
Courage is something which we badly need. We are living in a moment characterized to a very great degree by metaphysical despair, by what the critic Raymond Williams described as “the felt loss of a future.”[2] Intractable alienation and social discord; political fragmentation; the uncertainties of geopolitics and economics; and persistent racism, sexism, and violence — all of these engender a sense of existential peril.
And what of this stubborn pandemic? Here in Washington, we are again wearing masks indoors in public settings, the church included, after a hopeful two-month respite of seeing one another’s faces. Some are relieved; many more are disappointed. But these minor setbacks in the public health situation return our attention, yet again, to the fears to which the pandemic has given rise: we fear that the disruptions and dislocations of COVID have created permanent changes, that there is no going back, and that the “health, wholeness, and stability” to which we long to return will turn out to have been an illusion of our own making. But we would prefer that illusion to the present reality, wouldn’t we, we have to admit, if we’re being honest.[3]
And we should be honest, because that’s one of the key components of Christian courage.
In this morning’s first lesson, St Paul underlines the signal importance of honesty to Christian life. “Therefore,” he writes, “putting away falsehood, let every one speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.”[4] Our attention in that sentence is probably drawn to what appears to be its emphasis, to speaking the truth with our neighbors, and if you’re like me, you cringe at the thought of prim and sanctimonious lectures from irritating and self-righteous people – particularly irritating and self-righteous church people. But St Paul’s instruction is incomplete and in fact useless without its introductory phrase: “putting away falsehood.”
Putting away falsehood is anterior to speaking the truth. We cannot encounter our neighbors, or our family, or our friends, with the truthfulness which is part and parcel of Christian courage unless we are willing, again and again, with God’s help, to face the truth of our own lives.
So let’s be honest: the period in which we find ourselves living is uncertain, and it is unsettling. The fact that most other people have lived in uncertain and unsettling periods provides cold comfort. We’d rather health, wholeness, and stability were the rule, rather than the exception. But we must cast off from our reliance on such false gods. That’s a second essential component of courage in Christ’s name: giving up our hope in false gods.
For the past few weeks, our readings from St John’s gospel have given us the extended story of the feeding of the multitudes. Two weeks ago, we heard how a crowd of five thousand men, women, and children sat down in a field above the Sea of Galilee and famously ate their fill, all from just five barley loaves and two meagre fish. Last week, we heard how all of that was just the setup for Jesus to announce that he himself is the Bread of Life, those who eat of which will never die. And today, we hear about the crowd’s reaction to that announcement. How did people respond? It’s right there in today’s text. They began to murmur, to complain about Jesus. “Who does this guy think he is?” they say. “We know his father and his mother, and now here he is, claiming to have come down from heaven! What a joke.”
Sitting in Georgetown in 2021, it’s easy to forget what a controversial figure Jesus was. But our Lord’s announcement of himself as the bread of life strikes right at the heart of what his contemporaries thought they knew about God. They thought that they had this whole God business settled, and then here comes Jesus. His announcement undermined their whole conception of themselves and the world in which they thought they had been living, and it detonated their equilibrium. That’s why they despised him.[5]
You can see Jesus poking the bear last week, when he chastised the assembled crowd of followers for thinking with their stomachs. “You seek me,” he says, “not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” You are only interested in temporary things, in the things of this world, things which are ultimately going to let you down. And then, he tells them this: “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.”[6]
I think we can understand the reaction of the crowd to Jesus in this extended episode. It certainly makes a lot of intuitive sense. They were hungry, and he fed them, and in a remarkable way. Like most of us, the crowd’s loyalty was assigned in a direct relationship to the fullness of their bellies, but Jesus tells them to assign their full trust and devotion to the God who comes down from heaven and gives eternal life, the bread which feeds not merely the body, but the whole human person, even if he or she has only scraps to eat. Christian courage means that we must make that pivot as well, that we must place our trust not in the things that fill our bellies – in those seductive but false gods – but in the One who came down from heaven to give his flesh for the life of the world.[7]
The great theologian Karl Barth describes what that pivot looks like, what it means to reassign our loyalty and our trust. He writes:
… the gods set up, honoured and worshipped by men in ancient and recent times: the authorities on whom man relies, no matter whether they have the form of ideas or of any sort of powers of destiny, no matter what they are called. Faith delivers us from trust in such gods, and therefore also from the fear of them, from the disillusionments which they inevitably prepare for us again and again.[8]
What are the authorities on which we tend to rely? Position? Influence? Money? Access? All of those are nice to have, and all go a long way in sustaining the body. But in this recent period of uncertainty, brought on by the pandemic, those things have been unmasked as “frail and superfluous,” and the world which they undergirded has failed to provide either clarity or peace.[9]
And so we must let go our trust in those gods, and place our trust somewhere else.
Much later in St John’s gospel, our Lord will make a promise to his disciples, when he tells them, “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”[10]
The bread of life, which our Lord has revealed as his own self and his own flesh, is more powerful than the forces of entropy and decay which so dominate the world in which we do, in fact, have tribulation. Having courage with that good news at our backs means actually that we are able to have a light touch – rather than a heavy hand – regarding the way we think things are supposed to be. That’s easy to say; it’s harder to do, especially when our livelihood is connected to something that we fear is turning to dust. It’s hard to do, hard to put our whole trust in Jesus Christ, when we feel the ground shifting beneath our feet.
But in the face of desolation and disappointment and despair, we know that all is not lost. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women went to the tomb, expecting to find Jesus’ body lying in the tomb. What they found instead was news better than any they could have possibly imagined: “He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said.”[11]
It's hard to be courageous in the face of an uncertain future. It’s scary to be honest and to give up false gods, as we are forced away from safe harbor by unforeseen circumstance. But we are not alone. The future may not look like the past, and it may not look the way we would prefer, but whatever happens, we get to rely on the unshakable love of God, made known to us in Christ. If you would like to know what feels like; if you would like to know the spiritual posture of a courageous Christian, look no further than our closing hymn today, “Come down, O love divine,” in particular the second verse, which describes the operation of the love of God in a faithful and courageous heart:
O let it freely burn,
till earthly passions turn
to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light
shine ever on my sight,
and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.[12]
Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. But Jesus Christ is the living bread that comes down from heaven. Do you believe this? And can you, with God’s help, ground your courage in the promise of this shocking news?
AMEN.
[1] William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, I.vii.66.
[2] Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 103.
[3] Each week for at least a year, the intercessions at Christ Church, Georgetown, have included a prayer for “an end to the global pandemic, and the restoration of health, wholeness, and stability.”
[4] Ephesians
[5] Isaiah 53:3
[6] John 6:26-27
[7] John 6:51
[8] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 19, emphasis mine.
[9] Ibid, 18.
[10] John 16:33
[11] Matthew 28:6
[12] Bianco da Siena, trans. Richard Frederick Littledale (1861), Hymnal 1982, 516.