Musical Prelude and Service.

Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2 & John 6:35, 41-51
God is Holy Mystery, beyond complete knowledge, above perfect description.
Yet, in love, the one eternal God seeks relationship.
So God creates the universe
and with it the possibility of being and relating.
God tends the universe,
mending the broken and reconciling the estranged.
God enlivens the universe,
guiding all things toward harmony with their Source.
Grateful for God’s loving action, we cannot keep from singing.
That is the opening section from The Song of Faith, one of the documents included in the doctrine section of the United Church of Canada’s manual.
God mends the broken and reconciles the estranged. Guiding all things toward harmony with their source. That is an image I want to work with today.
So last week it seems my message prompted a few questions about the nature of forgiveness. I am grateful for those questions. They often challenge me to think about things I may take for granted, or to consider how to better articulate my view on those things.
Does forgiveness actually wipe the slate clean? Is that the end of any discussion of the sin or the harm that was done? Do we then forget what happened?
I’m not prepared to answer all of those questions today. I doubt we have enough time. We are certainly asked to forgive the trespasses that others commit against us. It’s part of the prayer Jesus taught us. And we are taught that God forgives our sins.
But how do we get there and what does it mean? Because, as I said last week, forgiveness does not wipe clean the consequences of our actions or our inactions.
Instead, what I would suggest, is forgiveness means our sins are not perpetually held against us. If we truly forgive someone, we may still experience pain for what happened, but we are not holding those actions over the head of our neighbour.
Likewise, God’s forgiveness of our sins means they are no longer part of some imagined list of wrongs that are counted against us in the future. God continues to love us and work with us.
But we who are seeking forgiveness also have a responsibility. We need to acknowledge the way we have trespassed against our neighbours, shall we say.
We need to own our actions, or our inaction. The words we have spoken, or the ways we have stayed silent in the face of injustice.
And finally, we need to be prepared to work towards reconciliation. Towards repair of the wounded relationships, we have with God and with God’s creation. Quite often, simply saying ‘I am sorry’ is not enough.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of John about eating the bread of life and finding eternal life with God, is often seen as a discussion of salvation. We are seeking salvation, and our Christian tradition says we find that salvation in our relationship with Jesus and through him, God. But what do we mean by salvation?
This is actually a much more complex question and conversation than one might at first imagine. We tend to be initially taught that to be saved means we have secured a place in heaven upon our death. That salvation comes through, to use some evangelical language, a personal relationship with Jesus, acknowledging him as the Messiah.
I’m not prepared to say that is wrong, but I also want to argue that this is only part of the conversation. Salvation I believe, has both that individual, perhaps personal component, but it also includes a communal aspect. Our salvation also comes as a community, or as all of creation. God comes among us as Jesus, to save the world.
God sees a wounded and hurting world and comes to us to offer healing. The word salvation means to heal. It holds the root for the word, salve, a healing balm.
God desires to heal the world. Salvation is not just about ensuring a place in heaven. It is about creating a new world that is whole.
Made in the image of God, we yearn for the fulfillment that is life in God.
Yet we choose to turn away from God.
We surrender ourselves to sin,
a disposition revealed in selfishness, cowardice, or apathy.
Becoming bound and complacent
in a web of false desires and wrong choices,
we bring harm to ourselves and others.
This brokenness in human life and community
is an outcome of sin.
Sin is not only personal
but accumulates
to become habitual and systemic forms
of injustice, violence, and hatred.
We are all touched by this brokenness:
the rise of selfish individualism
that erodes human solidarity;
the concentration of wealth and power
without regard for the needs of all;
the toxins of religious and ethnic bigotry;
the degradation of the blessedness of human bodies
and human passions through sexual exploitation;
the delusion of unchecked progress and limitless growth
that threatens our home, the earth;
the covert despair that lulls many into numb complicity
with empires and systems of domination.
We sing lament and repentance.
Yet evil does not—cannot—
undermine or overcome the love of God.
God forgives,
and calls all of us to confess our fears and failings
with honesty and humility.
God reconciles,
and calls us to repent the part we have played
in damaging our world, ourselves, and each other.
God transforms,
and calls us to protect the vulnerable,
to pray for deliverance from evil,
to work with God for the healing of the world,
that all might have abundant life.
We sing of grace.
Jesus describes himself as the bread that comes from heaven. We are offered this bread as a way of entering into a fuller and more satisfying relationship with God that enlivens us and opens us to a life that never ends.
Professor David Lose notes that Jesus continually describes himself in terms of everyday, mundane items. Water, wine, or the fruit of the vine, bread. Common objects that people encounter on a regular basis. For his family and neighbours, they themselves see Jesus as fairly mundane, a common carpenter. How can he claim to come from heaven?
But God can be found in the ordinary, the mundane, those people and objects we encounter every day and often take for granted. Water, bread, wine. All of these are beautiful and offer meaning and significance, if we stop and take time to reflect on how they come to be before us. So, too are all the people we encounter.
We experience God. We find God’s grace in the everyday aspects of our life. In the bread and wine, the water. We find visible signs of God’s grace in the way we relate to these objects. Thus, they are a part of the sacraments, communion and baptism, that we celebrate.
And so too, are we ourselves. If God works through bread and water – if Jesus can compare himself to bread, how can we see ourselves as not worthy of God’s grace? How can we describe ourselves as beyond the love of God? Our lives should be seen as a sacrament. A visible sign of a God’s invisible grace.
God comes among us as Jesus, seeking to heal the world. And Jesus invites us to be a part of that work. To eat of the bread of life and be a part of creating that world we yearn for, and that God is fully invested in creating.
That work is not necessarily awe inspiring or dramatic. It too can seem mundane; ordinary. But all the same, it is beautiful. It is part of God’s holy mystery and can and is world altering. At least it can alter the world of the people we encounter.
In Ephesians, we are told to be imitators of God and to live in love. Live in love.
Build up, do not turn to bitterness and malice. Live with kindness and focus on the beauty of creation.
God desires the healing of our world. We are unique personalities, each and everyone of us, beloved of God for who we are, but we are also more than who we are as individuals. We are part of God’s glorious creation. What we do matters – not only to ourselves but to the rest of Creation. We are connected in ways we often cannot even begin to comprehend.
But even as we may lose sight of our place in God’s wonderful world, we may contribute to the wounding of this world, God’s love never dies. Even as we come to see ourselves as not worthy of that love; God’s grace continues. We are forgiven.
Our actions are not held against us and God offers us yet another opportunity to participate in God’s healing of the world.
We place our hope in God.
We sing of a life beyond life
and a future good beyond imagining:
a new heaven and a new earth,
the end of sorrow, pain, and tears,
Christ’s return and life with God,
the making new of all things.
We yearn for the coming of that future,
even while participating in eternal life now.
Divine creation does not cease
until all things have found wholeness, union, and integration
with the common ground of all being.
As children of the Timeless One,
our time-bound lives will find completion
in the all-embracing Creator.
In the meantime, we embrace the present,
embodying hope, loving our enemies,
caring for the earth, choosing life.
Grateful for God’s loving action,
we cannot keep from singing.
Creating and seeking relationship,
in awe and trust,
we witness to Holy Mystery who is Wholly Love.
Amen.
Rev. Warner Bloomfield

Music provided with permission through licensing with CCLI License number
2701258 and One License # A-731789