Sermon at St. Thomas By Lynn E. Cunningham August 27, 2006 Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-25 Ephesians 5:21-33 John 6:60-69

Today the church shares the baptism for baby Ressa Lucas, Kate and Bob Lucas’s son. We welcome him into t he world and into the Body of Christ. Ressa has crossed over a kind of a boundary from birth into this world, and today he crosses over another kind of boundary into the fullness of the Body of Christ.
Crossing major boundaries in life can be difficult and scary at times. If you have ever hiked up Frontier Creek, you know how many little streams and creek crossings you have to make to get to the headwaters, always at risk of getting your feet soaked. Crossing over one life boundary or another can leave your feet soaked.
Last week, our guest speaker Esther DeWaal talked about living on the borderlands between England and Wales. She said she had learned some things about living on borderlands from her experience and from the Celtic heritage of prayer life. She encouraged a heightened awareness of living on the borderland between the everyday world of common labor and activities, and the presence of the holy in such activities.
Similarly, Sylvia in her sermon last Sunday captured nicely the profound metaphor of the eucharist meal, a meal which helps mediate the connection between the spiritual and the material. The eucharist can connect us with the holy through the quite physical elements of the bread and wine, eating the flesh of Christ and drinking his blood.
Today’s lessons about obedience offer encouragement and hope for making boundary crossings ahead of each of us.
For example, for the nine years before I moved to Dubois last year, I was a law school teacher coaching students in their early twenties on how to face the challenges after graduation. I remember one student, call her Susan, who was nearing the end of her three year law school career, and suddenly realized that she was going to have to get a job that would combine interesting work, but paid enough for her to pay off her enormous school debts. At the same time she wanted to find a decent man to marry and spend her life with. Decisions of this magnitude were overwhelming her with fear and anxiety. Most students had these anxieties, even though these greatly talented and energetic young people. How can a person possibly handle all this?
In Dubois, on the other hand, I find myself ministering among a group most of whom are fifty or sixty years older than my former students. Many of you have already completed your careers, and already raised children. But there are still boundaries to be crossed ahead of you. Before us lie new health issues, retirement issues, estate planning, where to live in our final years. And somewhere just over the horizon is that great final boundary of life, death itself.
If you think about it, striking similarities can be found between the anxiety my former students felt, with the anxiety and concern I sometimes sense here. At every stage of life,

everyone faces some serious boundary crossings ahead.

A couple of weeks ago, Betty Jo and Pete Brown held a somewhat tongue in cheek celebration of what they called their pre-kick-off. They held a big party as a kind of rehearsal for the crossing the final boundary in their lives. And they plan to do it again every year!
Ressa has already crossed some challenging barriers in the earliest days of his life, including health issues that required serious treatment. He will almost certain encounter in his life all the issues faced by my young students, and later the issues facing many of us here today.
What encouraging words would you offer him and his parents and godparents today, as we welcome him formally into the body of Christ?
What encouraging words do YOU need to hear to carry you through the boundary crossings ahead of you?
Encouragement can of course come in many forms. Conversation with a close friend. A friendly pat on the shoulder, or hug. Getting helpful guidance from a wise friend on how to handle a difficult situation. Enjoying the beauty of nature.
But ask yourself for a moment what is most deeply encouraging?
Is it not precisely what Sylvia expressed so powerfully in her sermon last week, namely, what is carried in this metaphor of bread and wine for Christ’s flesh and blood? Eating the bread and drinking the wine bring us closer to the Holy, she said. Eating the bread

and drinking the wine let us know, as one writer put it, that we are creatures who livewith one aspect of our lives in another country, so to speak, the country of the Holy One. This everyday, material world is suffused with the reality of God’s presence. Encouragement, then, lies in seeing that the material world is not flat and lifeless, but is suffused with the ongoing creative power of the Holy One.

As Esther DeWaal expressed in her discussion with us after church last Sunday, the most common, everyday, physical activities, walking, washing hands, cooking, take on a different quality when performed in the company of a prayer. The world is transformed by the right prayer for each moment when that prayer invites the sacred into the world.
This poem by the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas expresses it this way: I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had the treasure in it. I realize now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not hurrying

William Countryman in Living on the Borderland with the Holy. 2

on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Ressa, and each of you, live in this world that gives hope precisely because it is suffused with the mysterious reality of Holy One. The boundaries that we are crossing, are not these God’s ways of bringing each of us closer to Himself?
Peter Ensor in his sermon two weeks ago told the congregation, in no uncertain terms, that God did not promise his people a rose garden, but that God would always be with you, no matter what you are going through.
What I am preaching today provides simply another version of that message. I am saying that that metaphor of bread and wine for Christ’s body and blood carries our own spirits across into the sacred place that grounds us during all boundary crossings into new territories in our lives.
Our three friends from the Bible, – you remember the three friends that I have mentioned before -- the creation story, the exodus story, and the death and resurrection of Jesus, can serve to ground you. Staying grounded during a transition requires effort, discipline, and even a kind of obedience.
Each lesson today conveys a sense of sacred obedience. Joshua draws the Israelites into making a covenant with God at Shechem, by requiring them to worship and obey the one Holy God of Israel. Joshua tells them that only through such obedience can the people survive the next stages on their transition journey as a people deeper into the promised land of Israel. Only by following the one true God can the Israelites thrive.
Paul in his letter to the Ephesians provides us that unforgettable injunction: “wives be subject to your husbands.” Talk about a call for obedience! At least, that is the phrase that most people remember. But in fact this phrase is subordinated to the more general injunction in the preceding phrase which is addressed to everyone, namely, to everyone he is writing to in the church at Ephesus, he says, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” In other words, it is not just wives who must be subject to their husbands. Paul indeed tells husbands to be subject to their wives as well. And indeed, every one of us must be subject to one another out of reverence for the fact that Christ resides in each one of us.
I read Paul here to be asking Christians to offer the profound respect of obedience for everyone else out of the love of the Christ who is found in the other person. Paul is suggesting to each one of us, to put it another way, that the next time you experience someone ordering you around and you want to get angry with them because you do not like what they are telling you, seek to let meekness govern your response to them, rather than your anger. Every person is part of this mystical body of Christ, which is the metaphor for our spiritual connectedness, the formula for moving successfully together

through the challenges confronting all of us.

The passage from John’s gospel continues from last Sunday’s lesson to express the mystery of Jesus being the bread of heaven, and of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Today’s passage focuses our attention on how hard this message was and is to understand, and how several of his disciples left off from following him because they could not handle what he was telling them. Sylvia stressed the difficulty of this teaching in her sermon last Sunday. I read this passage to mean that the disciples’ failure to accept this part of Jesus’ message was disobedience to God. Just as the Israelites in the passage from Joshua had difficulty accepting the message that only Yahweh would be their God, so some of the disciples refused to accept how it is that God is in Christ. Their rejection was a form of disobedience and they thereby failed to find the words of eternal life, to use Peter’s remark to Jesus.
I suggest, then, that all three of the scripture passages teach obedience, not to a human authority figure, not to someone like a traffic cop, or to a superior officer in the military, but to the holy presence carried into our lives by all the things I have been talking about, the bread and the wine, the bright field in the R.S. Thomas poem, the Celtic moment to moment prayerfulness that attunes perceptions of the material world to its being a vehicle for the holy, moment to moment. And it is obedience to these realities for a purpose, namely to help nurture us through transitions.
So, baby Ressa, and Kate and Bob, welcome to a world that will continually place really, really big challenges before you at every stage of your life.
Let us all pray that you may learn true obedience to that sacred metaphor, carrying meaning back and forth between the material and the sacred, to see you through all the transitions ahead of you.
Let us all pray that God will grant you, Ressa, the kind of Transfiguration vision of eternal life that Ken Greenwald shared with us three weeks ago in his sermon given on Transfiguration Sunday. He said he wondered one evening --- as he stared up at the summit of Whiskey Mountain with his dog companion ---- he wondered whether there might be a Mt. Sinai tranfigurative vision in every person’s life. A time when that vision would allow them to reach a profound, sacred security that overcomes all fear.
In Jesus name. Amen.