August 26, 2018 – I Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-30; John 6:56-69
I Kings 8:1, 6, 10-11, 22-30, 41-30; John 6:56-69
Dwelling with the People
Lectionary 21B – August 26, 2018
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Where is God?
The question resonates through the readings today.
King Solomon builds a temple to house God, to make a place where God dwells.
He does this in spite of the fact that neither God nor the prophet Samuel
thought it was a good idea.
Previously God had chosen for a dwelling a tent, which travelled with the people
wherever they went – hey, that rhymes!
But Solomon is intent on erecting a big,
showy temple that would reflect the greatness of his reign,
a temple whose cost would be an onerous burden on the people.
Despite the poor choice, a choice God didn’t agree with,
God graciously remains with the people, and God remains with Solomon.
God works through and with the poor choices Solomon makes because,
as the reading says, God keeps covenant and hold steadfast love for the people.
In other words, God keeps up God’s end of the bargain to care for the people no matter what.
Because God loves the people.
At the beginning of John’s Gospel, it says Jesus comes to dwell or abide or, literally,
“tent” with the people.
Jesus comes to be the place where God dwells with the people.
The temple Solomon built was destroyed about 30 years after Jesus died.
Today Jewish people now find in scripture and its study the place where God dwells with them.
Christians find it in Jesus.
Jesus reveals that God wants to be where we are.
Wants to be very intimately connected with us.
In fact, in today’s reading, we discover just how close – how almost uncomfortably close –
Jesus wants to dwell with us.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
Whoa! That is close!
That is a difficult teaching, many of his disciples say.
Maybe even offensive, as Jesus points out.
And many begin to leave.
Up to this point, Jesus has been attracting many followers.
He’s fed thousands and he’s walked on water and has become like a celebrity.
But there is more to Jesus than that – everyone here this morning knows that.
Jesus wants to transform the entire universe – and Jesus wants to do it through you.
Jesus wants to work in you and through you.
And so Jesus wants to be very very close to you.
Jesus wants to be a physical part of you.
But abiding with Jesus, following Jesus, being a disciple of Jesus is difficult.
Forgiving is difficult, being part of healing is difficult, feeding the hungry is difficult,
making peace is difficult,
accepting others for who they are and where they are at is difficult.
And so, by the end of the reading, those who were only interested in the razzle dazzle leave,
and only the 12 remain.
And then Jesus asks one of the most poignant questions in scripture:
he looks at the 12 and says, “Do you also wish to go away?”
Do you also wish to go away?
It would be easy to judge all those people who left Jesus and went away.
And it would be easy, I guess, to hold Peter and his buddies up on a pedestal as
spiritual giants for sticking around.
But guess what? In the end, one of the 12 will betray Jesus and all the rest will abandon him.
In the end, they will all go away – all except for a few women.
So it’s fortunate Peter doesn’t give a typical bravura response here.
He doesn’t say, “Hey! We’ll never leave you! We have waaaaay more faith than that!”
He just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Jesus, where else can we go?
you are the one who has the words of fullness of life – you are the one who can give it.”
The thing that distinguishes Peter and the other 11 is not that they’re perfect,
not that they’re spiritual giants, but rather is simply this:
they know where to look for fullness of life – even when they screw up.
They know where to look for love, for grace, for forgiveness, for compassion.
And they know where to look for the transformation of the universe:
they know to look to Jesus.
They know Jesus is life.
The good news this morning is that Jesus does not abandon us.
Jesus – unlike all those followers – does not go away.
After God raised him from the dead, Jesus sought the 12 out –
not for the purpose of scolding them for abandoning him, but to forgive them and,
surprise surprise, feed them with a fish fry on the beach.
And there Jesus seeks again to abide in them, so that he might feed others through them:
having been fed by Jesus, they are to feed others.
Despite their poor choices, Jesus remains faithful.
Despite their failures, Jesus seeks to work through them.
They know what it is to fail – and they know what it is to be forgiven.
Jesus invites them to remember what it feels like to fail – for we all fail.
And Jesus invites them to remember what it feels like to be fed with forgiveness –
and there are many who need to be forgiven.
But this is hard.
It is not easy to let Jesus take up residence in you.
Abiding with Jesus is not easy – but it is life-giving.
And Jesus will slowly transform the universe through us, one loving encounter at a time.
We have a strange religion.
God, for sure, does not primarily dwell in a temple or a church building.
God dwells with the people wherever the people are, as the Israelites knew from
worshipping God in a tent all those years ago.
And when Jesus arrives on the scene he goes even further,
fulfilling Joel’s prophecy that God will dwell right inside the community of people,
and work through them for the transformation of the world.
Jesus has promised to be present in the bread and the wine – mysteriously, to be sure,
but present with all his gifts of love and grace.
So eat the bread, and drink the wine.
Be fed, be forgiven, be included and accepted for just who you are,
with all your failures and mistakes.
And feed, and forgive, and include and accept in turn.
That is what it means to abide in Jesus and for him to abide in you.
For in you, as a community of people, God has chosen to make God’s dwelling place.
You, now, are the body of Christ – dwelling in him, he dwelling in you, transforming the world.
A few weeks ago a visitor asked Kyle, who was assisting that day,
“Why do you have communion every Sunday?”
Well, there are a lot of good answers to that question.
But really it’s because we are hungry for grace and life – and we know where to look for it.
It’s because Jesus seeks to feed us so that we can feed others.
It’s so Jesus can abide in us and keep working his feeding,
forgiving, gracious including work through us.
It’s so Jesus can dwell in us –
it’s so we can become Jesus’ people of manna sharing and mercy giving.
It’s so that when people look at us and our community and what we are doing and
how we interact with one another and with our guests and our friends, they will say,
God is dwelling there.
So together, with Peter and all the 12 and every disciple of every time and place,
let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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