Winning the Interior Battles with the Presence of Christ

13 Pentecost  Cycle B proper 16  August 26, 2012

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18  Psalm 34:15-22

Ephesians 6:10-20  John 6:56-69

Lectionary Link

  Does faith and the military mix?  Religions have an uneven history with military warfare.  In the Old Testament there was a practice of holy wars, in the sense that Israel as God’s chosen people often thought and believed that God wanted them to wipe out all opposition to their possession of their “promised” territory.  But by the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel had been overrun by several empires and with the exception of some short lived victories by the Maccabees, they essentially had been an occupied country since just after the time of King David.  Human nature tells us something about just war theory and war; if one is on the winning side of an empire, it is easier to believe in war than if one is on the losing side of the empire.  Jesus came to an oppressed and occupied people; and there is evidence that he was crucified because he challenged the emperor of Rome, because some believed him to be the King of the Jews.  But in his words, Jesus said to love our enemies; he told his followers to turn their other cheek after being slapped.  As a result of the teachings of Jesus and in the early centuries of Christians living as a persecuted minority, Christians in the first three centuries were pacifists; they would not take up arms.  In fact, for almost four centuries Christians were not allowed in the Roman army.  After Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of his empire, Christian apologists (particularly St. Augustine) revived the just-war theory of the ancient Greeks to give a theological reason for taking up arms.  And at the end of the 4^th century, when Christianity was the official religion of the empire, only Christians could be in the army.  I guess the moral of history is that it is easier to be a pacifist when one has no power.

  What did moderate Muslims do after 9-11 when their extremists were exclaiming “jihad” or holy war?  Most of the Muslim pointed out that “jihad” was not about swords and spears, in fact jihad was an interior battle against one’s carnal nature; a fight on behalf of what is good and right.

  The writer of the Ephesian letter used the body armor of a warrior as a metaphor for weapons of righteousness against all of the enemies of the soul.  This teaching for the Ephesian church asserted that the real battle was against principalities in unseen places and so the spiritual warfare was the primary battle.  You and I know that negative possibilities; things that actually have not happened, things unseen, have a force and a power to keep us from doing good things.  Fearing fear itself has probably hindered more good things from happening than any other actual physical force.

  We have a long history of wars being fought for good religious or Christian reasons.  We have seen tanks and fighter planes and shields decorated with crosses.

  The history of the world is a history of conflict and fighting and war have often come to horrendous expressions, and whose side one is on has often determined one’s view towards war.

  I am not naïve enough to believe that the world will soon be free of war, but I do believe as much as we can we need to embrace the interior conflict of the Spirit against the many forms of selfishness and the forces of fear and anxiety.  I believe that we have battles and wars in our world because the interior battle against all forms of selfishness and anxiety has often been lost.  The battle against greed and selfishness is lost first in the lives of tyrants and when tyranny and oppression occurs tyrants use fear as a force against those whom they oppress.  Against tyrants, the use of war to protect the oppressed may be just, though not easy.

  The bread of heaven discourse in the Gospel of reveals evidence of totally different sort of conflict within the early Christian community; ironically it was a battle of words and understanding about the Eucharist.  Within the Gospel of John one can find the roots for most of the Eucharistic conflicts that have divided the church, so much so that we could say that Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Methodists are people who are divided by having a common religion.

  The words of Jesus in the written text show the words of the early preachers who spoke in the name of Jesus and who observed the controversies in those early circumstances.  Many people could not believe that the risen Christ was still present in the community.  And some people could not believe in the Holy Eucharist as a way in which Jesus really promised to be present.  They chose to interpret the words of Jesus as a literal “cannibalism” of actually eating flesh and drinking blood.  The disciples represent those who understood the inner meaning of the words. The interpretation that is given by the oracle of Jesus is this:    It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.  Now if you think this settled the issue, the history of the Eucharistic controversies fills the pages of Church history.  So we have different ways of speaking about how Jesus is present in the bread and the wine:  transubstantiation, consubstantiation, a memorial presence, receptionism, a symbolic presence, a spiritual presence,  a real presence and typically Episcopalians hold all of these positions which is another reason why we are always in disagreement within our own family of faith.

  We might clarify the issue by refusing to divide the human person into entities of body, soul and spirit.  Even though we do this for speaking purposes, in actuality the human person is an indivisible entity.  At death it may seem as though the body is separated from what is inside of a person. The belief in the resurrection means that the living spirit and soul through God’s work has the ability to recreate a new body. So the spirit is not separated from the body because the spirit has as it were the potential to clone a new body.  When someone says that there is only a spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they seem to mean an incomplete or diminished presence.

  The early Church believed in a very substantial continuing presence of Christ in the church and they believed that his words and command in the Eucharist was a way of actualizing in history a particular and special presence of the risen Christ.  And yes it is a spiritual presence, but it is a presence that involves a substantial presence that can be known “as if” the person of Jesus was present.

  I am not sure that I can precisely tell you how Christ is present.  I used to be able to when fresh out seminary, I knew most everything, or so I thought.  With each day of my life, I become more comfortable with living with mystery and do not feel like I have to explain mystery.  Just as I cannot explain why I find the experience of the sublime in a work of art, a piece of music, a haunting sunset, in love and friendship, I cannot tell you about the science of the sublime presence of Christ in Eucharist.  I believe the Christian life is not really about verifying mystery in reductive ways; it is about the art of living and that art includes finding the sublime presence of Christ in many, many ways.

  I think that we as Christians have the freedom to get ourselves clear of ancient conflicts; conflicts as old as the biblical communities.  We really don’t have to be like biblical communities who came to open disagreement over things that essentially are mysterious.  What we can affirm is that there are many ways of appropriating the great mysteries of life and the great mystery of the sublime presence of Christ in our lives.

  The mystery of the presence of Christ to us today in the Eucharist is there for us to accept and embrace; we need not argue about the forensics of this mystery.  By the way, sacramentum is a Latin word; what is the Greek word for sacramentum?  Mysterion.  Sound familiar?  Since God is greater than we are, the divine presences will always be a mystery to our minds that are smaller than God’s greatness.  Let us embrace the reality of the presence of Christ, while never presuming that we can control it through our own understanding.   Mysteries are a genre of literature, “who dun it” books, crime and detective books.  The mystery of how the risen Christ is known to us is not one to solve.  Christians who think that they can solve it as a mystery with the correct language of description are more interested in controlling meaning.  The Mystery is the presence of Christ is of such a magnitude to keep us humble and to live in hope that this risen Christ will be an interior presence for us to wage a never ending battle against all forms of selfishness and fears and anxiety.   Amen.