Sunday August 25th, 2024 Worship

I spent a lot of time this past week driving up and down the state of Minnesota for multiple weddings and family adventures. One of the things that I always notice on my drives is the number of political billboards and signs for all sorts of candidates and causes. They are everywhere. Sometimes, even the same sign less than 10 feet apart, in case you missed it the first time. Regardless of who or what they are for, they are usually trying to shame and influence people into seeing that the information on the billboard is the only thing we should be paying attention to. Sometimes it appeals to our faith, while other times it just escalates to belittling and name-calling. This bombardment never ceases to amaze me, despite the fact that many of them haven’t changed much in last 7 years since I regularly made that drive between home and college.
Lord, to whom can we go? (John 6: 58). This isn’t just a question of Scripture, but is a question that I think guides a lot of our lives together. There are always people calling for our attention, to trust them and follow them. Whether that be celebrities, politicians, athletes, or any other public figure, it is really easy for us to turn to others for guidance on what we should do and how we should live our lives. If it wasn’t so easy to do this, there wouldn’t be entire careers made with social media or marketing and advertising. When all the choices we make in life keep stacking up, sometimes we just want someone to tell us what to do and what to think. Yet, at times, it can feel overwhelming when it comes time to choose who we should actually listen to.
Watching videos online it seems like one person says to do this thing and the next video says absolutely, under no circumstances, should you do that thing the first video recommended, but you should in fact be doing the opposite. Several dietitians that I follow on social media have made videos highlighting the absurdity of this back and forth, because if we listened to every piece of advice on the internet, then no food or drink is safe for consumption. Even when it comes to our spiritual lives, there are so many different versions of Scripture and different interpretations of it, often contradicting each other, that it feels difficult to know where to turn. Lord, to whom can we go? Because even going to your Word feels difficult at times.
Lord, how can we get there too? This seems to be the other part of the question because there are so many different spiritual helps that again contradict each other, that it is difficult to know how we are even supposed to approach our faith. Some traditions allow for questions while others highly suggest that you should just take what the clergy have to say at face value. For the longest time, people didn’t even have access to Scripture in their language, so they really had to just trust the interpretation of the preacher. Some say that we come to faith through the Holy Spirit while others say that we have to make the personal choice to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. These two approaches are diametrically opposed to one another.
Yet, at the same time, faith isn’t meant to only be an individual activity. We are meant to be in community with one another as we hear the words of Scripture and eat the Lord’s Supper. It helps us to think about Scripture in a way that is more expansive than just reading for the things we want to agree with or argue about. When we eat the meal, we are called to share it, to be in relationship with people from different social standings and backgrounds, as the meal breaks down the artificial divides that we put up among ourselves. But, even then, sometimes we as humans want to put so many rules and regulations around Communion that I think we forget that it’s the Lord’s Supper, not ours. I think sometimes it’s easy to forget that the church, and especially its leaders, are in fact not the same as God.
Lord, to whom can we go? When we don’t know who to turn to and our human nature gets in the way of listening to God, it becomes easier for us to walk away from the teachings of Jesus that we find disagreeable. We want to control who can come to the Communion table and we forget what the communion table is supposed to be about. We want to love our neighbors when it is easy and convenient. We want to feed and clothe our neighbors but like to add restrictions to it about how and when or even how much they can take. The people in today’s Gospel, when they don’t understand or agree with what Jesus is talking about decide that it is easier to turn away. How many times do we do that with his teachings too, especially when people give us a different interpretation that we find more agreeable or maybe even a little easier to follow.
Like the people who walk away from Jesus when he says things that they don’t want to hear, it has become so much easier for us to walk away from one another too instead of engaging in dialogue and really listening. I’m not saying that there aren’t reasons why we might not want to engage in dialogue, for our own safety and well-being, but in general it’s become so much easier for us to listen to just the things and people we agree with. I don’t think technology and social media has helped this at all either. Yet, all people deserve the opportunity to be in respectful dialogue with one another. But that isn’t always comfortable, instead it’s easier for us to turn to other figures as the one who offers us guidance for how to live our lives, to tell us who we should listen to and who we shouldn’t or how we are supposed to feel about certain issues without interrogating why we hold those views in the first place. We want to listen to those who reinforce what we think without challenging us to think about how there are other viewpoints that exist in the world too. In the midst of all this breakdown in relationships and conversations, Lord, to whom can we go?
It difficult to live in community with one another. Jesus never said that it would be easy. After all, we were given unique personalities and brains to think. Life would be significantly more boring if we were all the same. But, because of this blessed diversity, it means that sometimes it’s difficult to understand where other people are coming from. It’s easier to dismiss them outright or be afraid of them because someone else told us to than to have a conversation. I think part of this is just how much we like being right and we like feeling superior. When we enter into those dialogues with an openness to truly listen, it means that it might just change us and our perspective in the process, and that is terrifying to a lot of people.
When I was in college, I worked with an organization called Narrative 4 . Their whole mission was creating radical empathy through storytelling. This global process included people on two different sides of an issue, whether that be politics in general, immigration, you name it. And each person was partnered with someone from the other side. We did a big day of it with BBC filming where it was longtime residents of North Dakota partnered with recent immigrants and refugees. The people are paired up and each partner gets time to share their story. But, the caveat is that when the stories are shared in the large group the next day, each person tells the other person’s story in the 1st person. People become a lot less scary than we’re told they are when we take a moment to step into their shoes and truly listen to what has brought them to this point in their lives. And, this method is so effective because it is so different than the way we live in our world today. But, again, it’s so much easier to listen to the idea that we should be afraid of the people from whom we are different than to put in the effort to really get to know them and learn about their perspective. And, this isn’t just a one-sided issue, but it plagues our whole society.
Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life (John 6: 58). We hear this line from Simon Peter again and we sometimes even speak or sing it before we listen to the words of the Gospel, and we are called to keep coming back to this. When it is easier to turn to the ways of the world, to division and hatred, or indifference, we are called back to the words of Jesus. Words that sometimes challenge us or make us think. Words that might make us uncomfortable because they force us to confront the biases we are carrying and require a change in how we are living.
The words of eternal life aren’t just for us, but for the life of the world, and that requires shifting the center of our focus back to Christ and away from ourselves and the powerful people of the world. When we find ourselves stuck or overwhelmed by this, when the world calls us to follow its leaders and not ask any questions about how their values and teachings align with our faith, we continue to ask, Lord, to whom can we go? Trusting that God will be with us through the work of relearning and reshaping because God doesn’t always call us to the easy work, but we are called to keep returning to this question, especially when our faith and our lives come with questions, and we don’t know the way forward. Lord, to whom can we go?