“Aionios Zoe - Wise Living”

John 6:51-58 and Proverbs 9:1-6

Sunday, August 19, 2018
First Congregational United Church of Christ of Manhattan, KS

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

If you had a chance to see the recent documentary about Fred Rogers, “Won’t You By My Neighbor?” you will probably remember a particularly touching moment at the end where Mr. Rogers gives people an “invisible gift.” In his 2002 commencement speech at Dartmouth, Mr. Rogers invited the graduates into one silent minute to remember someone who had helped them along the way. Someone who had made a profound and significant impact on their lives.

In the film, we see various people who knew and worked with Fred Rogers do the same. They sit in silence - smiles playing across their faces, tears sometimes welling up in the corners of their eyes - as they remember those who helped them along their paths. And then we get to hear some of their reflections.

It is an important act to remember the teachers who have helped us become who we are. And if those teachers are still living, it’s a powerful gift to take the time to reach out and thank them for the difference they’ve made in our lives. As we gather to bless another year of learning and teaching, I am struck by how nicely the Revised Common Lectionary fits with that focus today.

Jesus is many things to many people - ruler, savior, healer, prophet, miracle-worker, rabble-rouser, and - of course - teacher. As we near the end of this very long chapter in John, Jesus has been on a major teaching spree about….bread. No, seriously. Take a look at the entire 6th chapter of John sometime. It’s bread for days. This is not a low-carb teaching.

In today’s lection, Jesus is trying to explain to the crowds that he is the bread of life. Whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood will have eternal life and will abide in him. Now, when you put it that way - eat my flesh, drink my blood - you can see how the disciples were perplexed and troubled.

But Jesus is adamant. He says that he was sent by God so that we will eat him and live. This is different, he says, than the bread that our ancestors ate - that manna in the wilderness that only lasted for a short time and then went rotten.

“Eat my flesh” sounds pretty bizarre, right? So maybe it helps a bit to think of it more as taking Jesus into ourselves, finding unity with Christ, internalizing our deep connection with the Divine. However you look at it, Jesus says that it’s the key to finding aionios zoe - eternal life.

Eternal life is not really a great translation for aionios zoe. That Greek phrase means without beginning and without end, from alpha to omega, beyond all time. I think we typically think of eternal life more as “without end,” right? Heaven, pearly gates, streets of gold, etc. But many scholars have argued that the original Greek phrase is not really linked at all to what happens after we DIE but is more about the quality of life that we have while we are here on this Earth.

In other words, it’s not about how long you live. It’s about how you live your life.

Paired here with Jesus’s teaching that eating the Bread of Life will make us abide in him and him in us, that qualitative definition makes sense. To find eternal life is to find a way of living where we are completely contained in the Holy and the Holy is completely contained in us. It means that we are secure in our connection to God at each and every moment - which means, of course, that we also carry a deep awareness of our connection to each other.

It’s a way of living that is deeply rooted in the ancient concept of Wisdom, which we also see highlighted in today’s passage from Proverbs. Now, I could preach an entire sermon series about Wisdom with a Capital W, but I’m just going to sketch a very basic bit of her today. Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible is personified as a woman. You may know her by her Greek name, Sophia.

Lady Wisdom was with God at the beginning and will be with God beyond the end of time. In some sects of Christianity over the centuries, she has become almost a fourth person of the Trinity. As Haggia Sophia - Holy Wisdom - she has been linked with the Divine Feminine as well as the Theotokos - mother of God. But she is also linked to Christ, the Word, the Logos, who has sometimes been called the Wisdom of God. And she is sometimes linked to the Holy Spirit, who has often been personified as female in Christian tradition.

Lady Wisdom is important. To follow Lady Wisdom is to continually turn toward God. That’s why she is always shouting in the streets or at the gate to the city. If we updated her for the 21st century, I think she’d be Tweeting at us or taking over the notifications on our smartphones. She is clamoring for our attention amidst all the distractions of the world trying to help us remember who we are and whose we are. That we were created for love and we are beloved. And that all we have to do to find aionios zoe - a full life beyond the beginning the end - is to turn to God again and again and again.

And in this particular passage in Proverbs, she is very much tied to the practice of hospitality. She has built a sturdy house, prepared a delicious meal and she invites us in. Especially those of us who are struggling. “Come, eat this bread, drink this cup,” she says. “Forget about all the ridiculous mistakes you’ve made. Sit with me for a spell and I will help you find a better path.”

You can kind of see where Jesus got some of his material, right?

That universal human experience of growing up, learning, changing, transforming, seeking wisdom, struggling to find a better path, forgiving ourselves for our mistakes….in these two passages it is absolutely a communal process. It’s not something we do alone, no matter how self-sufficient we think we might be. We are invited to the table by Lady Wisdom and Jesus Christ and we gather at that table with other travelers on the journey.

Like Mr. Rogers said, we all have teachers. And we would do well to remember that none of us is self-made.

I recently read two memoirs by two very different women. Both were quest memoirs - women on a journeys. The first, Educated by Tara Westover, is the story of how a young woman who was raised in a very isolated survivalist family in Idaho eventually found her way to BYU and later Cambridge. Ms. Westover had never set a foot in a classroom when she started college. Her parents theoretically home-schooled her, but, in reality, she spent most days of her childhood scrapping metal with her dad in a junk yard. She tells the story of sitting in a classroom her first semester at BYU and being asked to read the caption of a photo aloud. She stumbled over a word in the middle of the text, saying, “I don’t know that word.” Her professor looks shocked and gives her a smiling-grimace, “Well, thanks for THAT,” he says. After class, a classmate chastises her, “That’s not something to joke about. I can’t believe you did that.”

Horrified, Westover makes her way to the library to look up the word. Finally, she finds it in the dictionary, “Holocaust.” She had never heard of it before.

Westover makes her way through college and grad school with grit and determination. Throughout her story, I was struck by how completely self-reliant she is. She was never given any support by her family as a child - in fact, her mom once tried to make her pay rent when she was 16 because her mom had lost track of how old she was and thought she was 20. Westover had to do everything herself.

But this is not some romanticized tale of a woman pulling herself up by her own bootstraps. Because Westover strikes me as exceedingly lonely. She has no one she can trust, few guides, and so very much of her life is filled with failed relationships and misery.

Contrast this quest story with another memoir, Stalking God by Anjali Kumar. Another young woman in search of wisdom - this time in the form of spiritual revelation. Though she was raised Jain, she finds that, as an adult, she has no spiritual home and wants to be able to find the answers to questions like “why are we here?” And “is there a God?”

So Kumar goes on a quest to find the answers. She hangs out with witches and laughing yogis. She participates in a silent retreat and tantric sound healing. She talks to a medium and almost does drugs in Peru. She rides a bike at SoulCycle and in the desert at Burning Man.

Throughout her journey, Kumar is surrounded by support. Friends, co-workers, and strangers advise her about where to look for God and she listens. Time after time, she shares tidbits of life-altering wisdom she receives from teachers and other seekers. Again and again she says “yes” when people offer to help her or invite her outside of her comfort zone.

Kumar may never “find God” specifically the way she wants to, but she does growsin her wisdom and maturity as she realizes that the Holy is only found in the connections we nurture.

God is found when we gather at tables. God is found when we take time to break bread together. God is found when we honor silence and remember our teachers. God is found when we honor children by blessing them as they walk out into the wide world. God is found when we honor our elders by listening to their stories.

God is found when we turn again and again towards Wisdom - who is always inviting us into aionios zoe - that way of living that goes beyond human boundaries. That way of living that is complete, full, abundant, and exists beyond alpha and omega.

God is seeking us. God is inviting us to the table. God will never stop nurturing us. All we have to do is keep saying yes.