So James looked around. And he saw fellow Christians, who said that they believed in the radical leveling of humanity in the way of Jesus, where there was supposedly no longer Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. And yet here were Jesus’s people arranging themselves according to the same old criteria the world had always used. He could tell by their seating charts and the deference they paid to certain kinds of people who dressed in certain ways that they didn’t believe what they said they believed. It’s not that you have to do good works to prove you have faith. It’s just that, no matter what you say you believe, what you actually believe will always win out. Always. So all James is really asking is that people stop deceiving themselves. Start there. With the truth your life is telling all the time.
The Song of Songs and Reverend Al teach us that there is an intersubjectivity to our lives and that we are all in this together. The Song of Songs reminds us that God longs to relish that kind of connection with us, and yearns for us to relish it with each other. And God longs to end our anxieties, to fill us with hope, and to inspire us to be that hope.
When Jesus tells the people after the feeding that he is the bread of life, he is not giving a lesson in eucharistic theology. And when he says “believe in me,” he is not establishing membership requirements for becoming a Christian. He is inviting them into a deeper, more mature life, a life of intimate connection to one he calls Father, the source of all life.
It’s astonishing that stories written down more than 25 centuries ago, stories about two humans and a tree in a garden or a king who realizes he’ll need wisdom to rule well … it’s amazing that these stories speak so clearly and directly to life in a nuclear age of quarks and quantum computing and all the rest. What they ask is, “Do you have the wisdom, the moral discernment, to be entrusted with the knowledge or authority or power that you possess?” And too often, from that moment in the garden, to the U.N. climate report just last week, the answer has been a sobering, “No. No we don’t.” Too often we haven’t possessed the wisdom, or even the humility to ask for that wisdom, to use our knowledge or power to bring our lives and our world back into the wholeness we long for. The wholeness something in us knows we were made for.
I don’t suppose you could argue successfully that Memphis is on any kind of mountaintop, but it is on a bluff above a mighty river; and that is not nothing. What I not only believe but know is that there have been many transfigured moments within the life of this community—moments when light has shown brighter than any darkness around. I believe that pairing our founding with this sacred story from scripture is appropriate and more importantly that it is inspirational for us these nearly 200 years after the birth of this wonderful parish.