If you are a sports fan, then you might understand it when I say we are
sort of in a sporting purgatory. There
really isn’t much going on in the sporting arena right now. We are stuck between most of the major seasons. Football is a few weeks away. Golf is pretty much over. Basketball is a winter sport and nobody
watches hockey anyway—at least not around these parts.
But there is baseball. There is
ALWAYS baseball, the sport that bleeds into every other major sporting season. However, during these few weeks of the year, there
is only baseball. That is okay because
we are getting closer to the playoffs and games actually matter at this point
in the season. So perhaps like you, I am
sort of paying attention to what is going on.
This baseball season is particularly exciting because the team that I hate
to love might actually go to the playoffs this year. As a son of a mother who is from Chicago, I
am hoping that the beloved Cubbies finally break the curse of Billy the goat.
The Cubs haven’t won a World Series in over one-hundred years and when
they have had a chance to win, they always blow it and most of the time they
blow it in remarkable fashion—even their fans somehow manage to blow it. It isn’t easy being a Cubs fan.
So I have a confession to make. I
have been sort of a fair weather Cub’s fan.
I’ve pledged my allegiance to several other teams over the years. When my favorite childhood star, Ken Griffey,
Jr., was traded to the Cincinnati Reds, a division rival, I started pulling for
the Reds. When my grandfather’s favorite
team, the St. Louis Cardinals, another division rival, started winning all the
time, I started pulling for the Cardinals.
And when I started attending seminary in the D.C. area, I became a
Washington Nationals fan. I remember
going to a Nats/Cubs game and pulled for the Nats instead. Even though the Nats were just as bad if not
worse than the Cubs at the time, at least their inability to win anything
significant wouldn’t hurt has bad. There
is a silver lining—I never resorted to pulling for the Yankees!
It exhausts me to be a Cubs fan or even a fan of baseball in general. In reality, it exhausts me to be a sports fan
in general. Even as exhausting as it is,
I can’t get enough sports even though I wish I could live without it.
Anyway, my point is, I feel like the insanity of trying to be a loyal sports
fan isn’t all that much different than the insanity of trying to survive in
this world. Left to my own devices, I
feel like I am constantly trying to find fulfillment in the next best thing. When something stops working for me, I try
something else and the cycle repeats itself.
And it is exhausting.
We live in a world where so many promise to have the ultimate claim
over truth. If you try this exercise
routine, if you try this diet, if you try this prayer method, if you read this
book, if you subscribe to this publication, if you take this pill, if you go to
this church, then you will find salvation.
But instead of finding salvation, we end up like a fickle sports fan,
and exhaust ourselves by jumping all over the map in order to find
fulfillment.
But the reality is, no matter how innovative and helpful these truth
claims may be they end up failing us because they are only temporary. If we don't see that these truth claims are simply vehicles that point to ultimate truth, then we will end up like the dog who looks at the finger and not what the finger is point at. We will try to find happiness in all the wrong
places—even those places that the world deems good. And because of this
C.S. Lewis once said, “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may
lose.”
Consider for a minute all the things that you put your trust in for
your livelihood in this world—your house, food, transportation, money, health
insurance, friends, family, even life as you know it, and the list goes on. And out of all those things, can you name one
thing that you can absolutely say that you will never lose?
While I know many of you have lost these things, most of us in this
room will probably have these things for the rest of our lives. But as Job
learned, any of those things could be taken away in the blink of an eye. And what then? How will we respond?
I don’t say these things to try and scare you but rather to get you to
thinking about temporary truths vs. everlasting truth. And if you have been following along in the
Gospel according to John over the last few weeks, you have noticed that Jesus has
been trying to get his followers to understand the same thing. Jesus is trying to change their
perspective. Instead of putting trust in
a world that is perishing, Jesus is giving his followers a faith in a world
that is everlasting.
In Jesus’ case, he uses the image of bread to help describe the difference
between temporary and eternal truth.
Jesus basically tells his followers that you can either use up your
energy consuming bread that perishes for the rest of your life or you can eat
my flesh which is food for the life of the world and if you eat this food, you
will live.
Yes, Jesus certainly gives them bread that perishes. He turns a few loaves into enough for
5,000. And of course, God gives us all
those good things we need to have in order to live in this world. God gives us our shelter and our food and whatever
else it takes to survive. But God also
knows that this world is only temporary.
Our fundamentally broken creation that is filled with fundamentally
broken people will not last forever.
So what does God do? God gives
us food that lasts. God gives us something
that will endure even the apocalypse. For
the life of the world, God gives us the Word made Flesh—Jesus Christ. And through the death and resurrection of the
Word made Flesh, God is showing us that his Word is eternal truth—not even
death can end the truth of God’s Word.
God’s truth will outlive any earthly reality and if we eat God’s truth
then we will endure any earthly reality as well. Jesus said that even heaven
and earth will pass away but God’s Word will never pass away. Think about that God’s Word will never pass
away!
And what is God Word? First and
foremost, God’s Word is life. Anytime
God speaks life follows. In the
beginning, God said let there be light and there was light. God’s Word made a way through the Red Sea for
the Hebrew People when they were being chased into certain death by Pharaoh’s
Army. God’s Word made a promise to the
people in exile that he will write his promise of love not on a tablet of stone
but on their hearts.
And you know what? God did. God has written on our hearts forever his
promise through the sacrifice of his Son, a sacrifice that calls us to remember
who we are and what we represent. We are
beloved sons and daughters of God Almighty, and we have been chosen by God to
tell the world about the eternal truth of his life and love.
We aren’t called to save the world or fix the world or condemn the
world. Instead, we are called to point
to the one who has already saved the world.
I am stealing this from someone else but we are called to point to the
one who holds the broken pieces of this world together in hands of love.
Like we remembered last Sunday with Bishop Curry, we are called to point
to the one who holds the whole world in his hands. We can tell the world to stop with the insanity
of trying to find truth in all the wrong places and look to the one whose truth
is quite literally out of this world!
I know that putting trust in God’s world surpasses human understanding. And the more God in Christ reveals this world
to his followers the more difficult it becomes for his followers to
believe. You might say that Jesus’ fall
more in love with his signs and miracles than they do the reality God has
created beyond signs and miracles. And
so many walk away and try to find a more convenient truth.
Jesus knows this and therefore asks Peter, “Are you going to leave me
to?” And to that Peter basically says, “Where
else can I go?” Peter knows that there
is no other team worth rooting for other the one Jesus is on. Even though Peter stumbles around in his
faith, he knows that Jesus is the only way to life, he knows that the Word made
flesh is the only truth worth following in this world.
I often like to think of our spiritual journey like that of a toddler who
is in the mode of discovery. Like
toddlers, we have a hard time believing that our heavenly Father is right—even though—he
is, well, the creator of the universe!
And as a parent of a toddler, I feel like I am constantly trying to teach
Mary Katherine to learn not how to fall.
And sometimes this seems impossible—she just doesn’t listen. So, I find myself asking God for help when it
comes to this parenting thing, and I always remember the grace that I have
known through my heavenly Father.
Even more important than teaching us to learn not how to fall, our heavenly
Father teaches us how to stand up again after we have fallen. Through grace, our heavenly Father picks us
up and gives us the strength and courage to try again in hopes that we fly the
next time! We have a God who is less
concerned about our mistakes and more concerned with how we learn from our
failure and live more and more into the eternal reality made known in Christ
Jesus.
And like we talked about in our Summer Conversation on Thursday, we
have a God who has created a community of love and grace and compassion where we
are allowed to fail and get back up and try again. Through Christ, God has a community where we can grow in grace and love. God’s community is not three strikes and you’re
out. Instead, God’s community is
everlasting and we know this through the living Word of God.
Thanks be to God because we all have a whole lot of growing up to do
and who better to be nurtured by than a God of grace who holds the whole world
in his hands of unending love. Amen.
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