This weekend is the one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white nationalist groups from around the country gathered to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The protests quickly turned violent, the most serious occurring when one of the protestors drove his car through a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring nineteen and killing one, a young woman named Heather Heyer. A helicopter carrying two members of the Virginia State Police also crashed that day, bringing the death total to three. All this week, various news sources have been covering the anniversary of those events, and one that got me thinking was a comment from Joshua Johnson, host of The 1A, who remarked, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said ‘the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ But if Dr. King was right, how long is this moral arc and how long is it taking us to get there?”
Friends, I’ve said this before, but I’m tired. I actually wasn’t even thinking about the anniversary of the protests earlier this week, because I kept hearing stories about how the climate is warming faster than earlier thought, and some scientists are predicting we are dangerously closing in on the point of no return. This was to say nothing of the closer to home, more immediate concerns within our community of financial struggles, health concerns, etc. I share this with you not to illicit your sympathy, but just to say, I’m tired too. I know you’re tired, because I’m your pastor and it’s my job to know. And I also know that most of you aren’t even at the global climate change level of concern, because these closer in things, health, finances, grief, and relationships, these things are obviously and importantly more front and center. With all this, how do we get up and get through the day?
We are in the middle of this discourse by Jesus about how he is the Bread of Life. Last week we heard him say, “don’t work for the food that perishes, but the food that endures for eternal life.” This morning we heard him say, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” I’ve been thinking a lot this week about this idea of endurance, about what Jesus meant when he said he was “the food that endures.” We know Jesus was speaking metaphorically, that this was not some sort of weird acetic diet plan, where if your faith is strong enough you never have to eat, because eating is a biologic necessity. The reading this morning started out, “whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty,” yet from the cross Jesus said, “In order to fulfill the scripture, ‘I thirst.’” And we know communion is not supposed to be a one-time thing, our liturgy says, “as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we remember Christ’s death until he comes again.” “As often,” it says. Not once, not even when, but as often. So what is endurance, if we get hungry, and we’re supposed to do this communion thing a lot? What is the food that endures?
There is a verse in this morning’s text that cracked it open for me, and that was verse forty-four. Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” Let me read that again, so you catch it, “no one can come to me unless drawn by the Father.” As Lutherans we proclaim we are saved by grace through faith, and it is not our faith, but God’s faith, that sounds like what Jesus was saying here. We can’t come to Jesus, we can’t choose Jesus, until God first chooses us, until God draws us. Which, God has done, in the person of Jesus.
This endurance, this “food that endures,” isn’t our food, it’s God. God is the one that endures. No matter where we go, what mistakes we make, how badly we screw up, God is the one who endures in us, with us, through us, again and again meeting us where we’re at and moving us forward into a new reality. It is slow, it is infinitesimally slow, but we are moving forward. King’s moral arc is bending. As blasphemous as this is going to sound given the current state of the world and how things feel, things really are improving. One of the many gifts of our sacred scripture is we can see this progress. So, quick history lesson. We think of the Bible as one book, but it’s really a collection of sixty-six books written over thousands of years. Which means that in this one book we can see humanity evolving, we can see God moving us ever onward from one place to the next. Back in Exodus, the Ten Commandments, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or house, or slave.” To Galatians, “there is no longer male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free.” I don’t think this shift means God changed. I can’t imagine back in the time of the Exodus, God was onboard with slavery and women being property, and then God got enlightened along the way and was like, “oh, women are people and no people are property.” Rather, I see this as a sign of God meeting God’s people where they were at in their cultural context and slowly moving them along to where God wanted them, wants us, to be. Are we there yet, no, obviously not. The “Jews will not replace us” signs in Washington, DC this weekend assure us we’ve got a long way to go, but compared to the books of Joshua and Judges, where it was considered completely acceptable to wipe out entire communities of people, we’ve come a long way. And if God didn’t give up on us then, God isn’t going anywhere now. The Bible gives us three thousand years of God’s history of sticking around with God’s stubborn and wayward and easily distracted people. Friends, clearly this God we worship isn’t going anywhere.
I’ve been talking pretty globally, but there is also something intensely personal about how God endures. God doesn’t just endure with us as a species, God endures with us as individuals. Watch this. “The Lord be with you.” [And also with you.] Lift up your hearts. [We lift them to the Lord.] Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. [It is right to give God thanks and praise.] Did you see that? Did you see how you all just knew that? You didn’t have to think about it, it just was automatic. That, my friends, is the food that endures for eternal life. You will literally never lose that, because it isn’t stored in your mind, it’s stored in your body, it’s stored in your soul. During seminary I did a chaplaincy internship at a skilled nursing facility and I spent most of my time in the memory care unit. These folk had lost most of their identities, most of their memories, most of who they were. But when we would gather around the couches, read the twenty-third psalm, sing hymns, and say the liturgy, word perfect, every time. I remember sitting with my grandmother towards the end of her life when someone from her church came to give her communion. As the woman was reading a Bible story, my grandmother piped up, “who’s Jesus, he seems nice.” But when it came to the liturgy, when it came to the Lord’s Prayer, she knew it. And I knew, that while she had forgotten who Jesus was, Jesus hadn’t forgotten her. That food that endures was enduring in her, it was feeding her, sustaining her, holding her when she could no longer hold it. And now, as a pastor, I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ve even seen it in people who’ve walked away from the church, who’ve left the faith, who’ve openly disbelieved, there is still this thing that keeps drawing inside of us. We can try to leave God, but God never leaves us, we carry God in our bodies, no matter what happens, because God endures. The word translated as belief, is really better translated as trust because belief has this sense of intellectual agreement, but this endurance is beyond our intellect, it is something we carry in our subconscious, we can no more forget it than we can forget to breath.
So be comforted, dear friends in Christ, for God endures. In you, with you, forever. The moral arc of the universe is long. So very, very long for those of us who can see at best just a hundred years of it. But it is bending, bending, bending, towards God. Amen.
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