Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Rev. Daniel E. Somers, Dcn+

St. Andrew’s Church

Sermon

August 5, 2018

For those who have ears,     

            Welcome.  I hope that you have been having a wonderful summer.  Julia and I just returned from vacation on Nantucket where we had a seemingly constant stream of children grandchildren and guests.  A fourth grandchild is on its way.  Our son has been offered a new job with vastly improved pay and prospects.

            For some, it has not been the happiest of seasons.  Our friends and neighbors lost their toddler to a swimming pool last week.  From water does all life begin; for some tragically it ends. We attended her funeral on Friday.  One of our son’s best friends is in a hospital battling leukemia.  She is only 34.  Our Thom is facing a daunting battle of his own.  And Ellen has retired from the vestry to attend to her health.  For them, this is not a season of abundant renewal.  

Today’s reading from Exodus also finds us with people struggling.  The Israelites are whining. The Hebrew word is sometimes translated “murmur,” but it’s the same thing.  With our children, when young Julia and I would call it whinging.  The Israelites have been out of Egypt for all of two months. They have been, fairly recently, delivered from a truly bad situation, an unjust situation, a miserable situation. They were slaves in Egypt, perhaps building the pyramids. Without dignity, without self-determination, treated as property, they cried out to God. God heard them, delivered them from the Egyptians, brought them in safety to freedom.

And now they are in that middle place, the wilderness: no longer in bondage to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, not yet in the promised land. They are fairly new at freedom and they are finding it a challenge.  Now before we get too carried away with the story, keep in mind that much if not all of it is myth.  It is in fact part of the creation story of our ancient ancestors.  There is no historical record of Moses or of a slave rebellion fleeing across the Red Sea into Sinai.  

In any event, people are hungry, and they turn on Moses and Aaron, who are probably hot and tired and hungry too, and wishing that God wasn’t sending them on such a roundabout route to their ultimate destination.  The people whine, but more than the annoying sound of the whinging, it’s the irrational content that is stunning. “Moses, did you bring us out here to starve us to death? If only we were back in Egypt!”

Freedom is a challenge. For one thing, instead of just being told what to do all the time, they have to learn a new skill. Complaining they’ve got down cold. Now they have to learn to trust. They have to learn to trust God. They have to learn to open their eyes and hearts and learn a new way of being in the world.  It was time to learn a new skill. Trust in God.

To feed them, God gave the Israelites the gift of manna, a fine flaky substance that appeared on the ground every morning. It was so peculiar, new, wondrous, that the people ask, “What is it?” – in Hebrew, it sounds like “manna?” and the name sticks.

The food is wondrous not only because it appears overnight while they are asleep, in this barren place, out of nowhere – or solely out of the abundance of God – but it together with the quail are theirs with no work, no labor, just grace, here they are.  As you will discover later in Exodus 34, these are a hard headed lot.  Moses has to turn the Levites loose on the Baal worshippers in their midst, slaying thousands – but we digress.

Now let’s get to the crux of today’s lection – the how and why and wherefore of active listening through astute questioning.  What you see in life depends on what you are looking at, and that what you hear depends on who you listen to, just as the answers you get depend largely on the questions you ask.

According to some of the great German thinkers, it’s the ‘fragestellung’ – i.e. the way you pose the question and the position of the questioner – that is all important in determining the answer you get.  I have one of my brethren from Down Under to thank for this insight.

We might need some help in understanding why Jesus responded with such aggression and even sarcasm to a group of people who asked him a very simple question – namely, “When did you get here?”  It was the first of a series of questions that a throng of people posed to Jesus, as recorded in today’s Gospel reading from John.

Jesus, it appears, was trying to put some distance between himself and the crowd that was pursuing him. So as darkness fell after the great feeding miracle, he withdrew quietly into the hills and, while the crowd slept, he crossed the lake.

The crowd though, it seems, outsmarts him and tracks him down. They find him and ask, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus responds with sarcasm, “You guys are only here for another free meal!”

Admittedly, that’s not a literal translation of John 6:26.

’You guys are only here for another feed’. It’s a harsh response to what seems to be a rather innocent question, but it’s the position of the questioner that is important here – the fragestellung. The answers they get from Jesus will depend on the questions they ask, and the problem is that they are asking the wrong questions because they are there for all the wrong reasons.

Mind you, I think it’s clear too that some people do come to Jesus because they are looking for solid wisdom and rules to live by. And indeed, that had to be a part of the agenda for the crowd who were chasing Jesus in John 6, for the first question they ask him (after the seemingly innocuous ’How long have you been here’) is “What must we do to perform the works of God?”

Perhaps that was their real agenda - their deeper reason - for following Jesus. Perhaps, for many of them at least, they weren’t simply looking for another free meal but really wanted someone to tell them how they ought to be living their lives – what rules they should be following in order to please God.

And so the crowd ask Jesus “What must we do to perform the works of God?” and Jesus, notably, refuses to dictate to any of them what they should do, beyond telling them that what they should do is believe in him!  No more Mosaic laws, all 613 of them!

And again the real issue here is the fragestellung - the ‘position of the questioner’ and the ‘putting of the question’. For of course there is nothing wrong, in itself, with asking Jesus how it is that God wants us to live, but if where you are coming from in asking that question is that you are looking for a straightforward set of laws and rules to live by, then it is not the right question, for that is not what Jesus was about.  He came to give us himself!

“I am the bread of life”, says Jesus, "The one who comes to me will never become hungry, and the one who believes in me will never become thirsty.”

And this is what we need to grasp, for this is the point of demarcation between Jesus and any number of other religious teachers, as this is the point of distinction between the Christian faith and any number of religious systems, life is not a life lived according to a new set of laws.

The great Jewish thinker Maimonides calls the oral tradition, ‘from the mouth of that which was heard.’ In Western culture understanding is a form of seeing. In Judaism it is a form of listening.

He wants us to listen, not just with our ears but with the deepest resources of our minds. If God had simply sought obedience, he would not have created human beings with a will of their own. Indeed if He had simply sought obedience, He would have been content with the company of angels, who constantly sing God’s praises and always do His will.

God, in making human beings “in His image,” was creating otherness. And the bridge between self and other is conversation: speaking and listening. When we speak, we tell others who and what we are. But when we listen, we allow others to tell us who they are. This is the supremely revelatory moment. And if we can’t listen to other people, then we certainly can’t listen to God, whose otherness is not relative but absolute.

One can almost imagine the Israelites saying to Moses, “OK. Enough already. We hear you,” and Moses replying, “No you don’t. You simply don’t understand what is happening here. The Creator of the entire universe is taking a personal interest in your welfare and destiny: you, the smallest of all nations and by no means the most righteous. Have you any idea of what that means?” Perhaps we still don’t.

Listening to another human being, let alone God, is an act of opening ourselves up to a mind radically other than our own. This takes courage. To listen is to make myself vulnerable. Our deepest certainties may be shaken by entering into the mind of one who thinks quite differently about the world. But it is essential to our humanity. It is the antidote to narcissism: the belief that we are the center of the universe. It is also the antidote to the fundamentalist mindset, “I’m right; you’re wrong; go to hell.”

Listening is a profoundly spiritual act. It can also be painful. It is comfortable not to have to listen, not to be challenged, not to be moved outside our comfort zone. Nowadays, courtesy of Google filters, Facebook friends, and the precise targeting of individuals made possible by the social media, it is easy to live in an echo-chamber in which we only get to hear the voices of those who share our views. “It’s the people not like us who make us grow.”

Hence the life-changing idea: Listening is the greatest gift we can give to another human being. To be listened to, to be heard, is to know that someone else takes me seriously. That is a redemptive act.  As we begin our journey together, you and I, this is what will be expected of each other – to listen to each other and pose the right questions.

Let me close with an untitled poem by Peter Porter that struck me while on vacation:

            The rooms and days we wandered through

            Shrink in my mind to one – there you

            Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm

            Which life could not provide is balm

            In death. Unseen by me, you look

            Past bed and stairs and half-read book

            Eternally upon your home,

            The end of pain, the left alone.

            I have no friend, no intercessor,

            No psychopomp or true confessor

            But only you who know my heart

            In every cramped and devious part –

            Then take my hand and lead me out,

            The sky is overcast by doubt,

            The time has come, I listen for

            Your words of comfort at the door,

            O guide me through the shoals of fear –

            “Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.”

            “Do not be frightened, I am beside you.”

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Amen.