18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading: Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35

I learned a new term this week: “the twisties.”
A friend of mine who is a former gymnast explained to me 
that this is when you lose what they call your “air sense”—
your awareness, after you have launched yourself into the air,
of exactly where you are located,
which way to are oriented,
how you are going to land—
the sense that allows the gymnast 
to turn what for most of us 
would be a chaotic tumble through space
into a graceful, gravity-defying dance.

A gymnast with the twisties is in considerable peril:
suddenly, in mid-arc, you are lost,
you literally don’t know which way is up
or how you are going to come down.
And once you lose your air sense
it is not certain when, or if, it will return.
Apparently, it was a bad case of the twisties
that led Simone Biles to withdraw 
from the team gymnastics competition
this past week at the Olympic Games.

I, obviously, am not a gymnast,
but I can relate to the twisties.
We all have dreams and aspirations 
that guide our choices
and, in a sense, give us our identity.
We launch ourselves, as it were, on various life-projects:
I am going to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher;
I am going to be the best parent possible;
I am going to be famous, rich, powerful;
I am going to be an Olympic athlete,
a professional musician,
a successful student.

Some of these aspirations,
these life-projects, 
are worthwhile,
and others not so much,
but whether worthy or not,
they come to define not just what we do
but who we are, our sense of self.
This sense of self is like the gymnast’s air sense:
having launched ourselves into pursuit of our dreams,
it is how we locate ourselves,
how we keep ourselves oriented,
how we know how we are going to land. 
But we can lose this sense of self.

We all know of people—
and maybe have experienced this ourselves—
whose aspirations are thwarted,
whose dreams do not work out,
whose dedication does not pay off.
I may be a hard-working pre-med student 
who does not do well enough on the MCAT
to get into medical school.
I may be an athlete who has spent years in training
but who is sidelined by a career-ending injury.
I may be a parent who has poured myself
into providing my children 
with a happy and secure life
but now watch then struggle 
with problems that I simply cannot fix.
If I am not a doctor, an athlete,
a parent who can protect my children,
then what am I?
Who am I?
We get the twisties.
We are dislocated, disoriented,
and we don’t know how we will land.

The poet Dante begins his work The Divine Comedy
with the words, “Midway on our life’s journey
I found myself in a dark woods, the right road lost.”
In a moment of profound dislocation and disorientation,
Dante is not exactly sure how it is that he come to this point.
He too had aspirations: to be a great poet,
to achieve a kind of immortality through art,
to be a man of influence in his native city of Florence.
But these dreams seem to have come to nothing,
and he awakens in the middle of the arc of his life
as if from a dream to find 
that he has no idea how he will land.
He has the twisties.

But what Dante comes to see in his great poem
is that the one thing to which we should aspire,
the one great dream that should give us our sense of self,
the one lodestar by which we should orient ourselves,
is nothing so paltry as being a great artist or a person of influence,
nothing so fragile as having a career or honor or wealth,
but only being a follower of Jesus Christ.
Of course it is a fine thing to have aspirations—
our world would be impoverished 
without the passion of artists,
without the drive of athletes,
without the dreams of parents for their children.
But none of these aspirations is enough
to give us a sense of self that can survive
the twists and turns of fortune,
none of these can locate and orient us
in a way that will allow us to land in God’s kingdom,
none of these can make for us a self
that will be eternal.
 
In the Gospel today Jesus says,
“Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
We should not base our sense of self 
on aspirations for passing things.
St. Paul speaks in our second reading 
of a self “corrupted by deceitful desires.”
We are deceived by any desire for worldly achievement
that promises to give us a self that is secure,
because the world is constantly passing away
and the self that is based on worldly achievement
passes away with it.

This is why Paul tells us this morning 
“you should put away the old self 
of your former way of life…
and put on the new self.”
When we find ourselves with the twisties—
when in the middle of our life’s journey
we find ourselves dislocated, disoriented, 
with no idea of how we will land—
God’s grace can relocate and reorient us,
give us a new aspiration that will not fail,
an aspiration for eternity.

When the people ask Jesus
“What can we do to accomplish the works of God?’ 
He responds,
‘This is the work of God, 
that you believe in the one he sent.” 
When we launch ourselves into the life of faith
we are not launching ourselves into a void
where our sense of self can slip from our grasp,
but into the hands of God.
We are launching ourselves into a new self
that is, as Paul says, “created in God’s way 
in righteousness and holiness of truth.”
We are launching ourselves 
into companionship with Jesus
on the journey to the kingdom.

It is not the case that on this journey
you will never feel dislocated or disoriented
or doubtful as to how you will land,
but in faith we trust Jesus,
the one whom God has sent,
the one who comes to meet us 
in the middle of our life’s journey
to grasp ahold of us,
to located and orient us, 
to bring us safely home.

So let us aspire to share in God’s eternity,
let us trust that God will be there to catch us when we fail,
let us pray that God will have mercy on us all.

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35

Homily preached at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology.

I am put in mind of our vocation
as historical theologians
when I hear of the Hebrews in today’s first reading,
given miraculous bread by the Lord
to sustain them on their desert journey,
bread that appears each morning
for them to gather before it vanishes,
bread that is identified in today’s Gospel
as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ,
God’s incarnate Word,
the true bread that has come down from heaven.
“On seeing it, the Israelites asked one another, ‘What is this?’
for they did not know what it was.
But Moses told them,
‘This is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.’”

The Word of God
has been spread abroad in human history.
It lies before us like miraculous bread,
the food of the kingdom upon which we will feast eternally,
waiting to be gathered so that it may nourish us
on our pilgrimage through that history
to the new Jerusalem.
We gather what has been spread abroad,
the supersubstantial bread of the Word,
finding it sometimes in the most unlikely places:
Christologies of mixture and early Christian dialogues,
the writings of James of Eltville and of Reginald Pole,
texts from St. Thomas and, yes, even Scotus.
We come across a previously unknown manuscript
or some long-ignored passage in Augustine
and we ask one another, “What is this?”
It is the bread that the Lord has given us to eat,
and not just us, but all of God’s pilgrim people.

As we ply our craft, in archives and classrooms,
committee meetings and academic colloquies,
we should always bear in our hearts those words:
it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.
And even more we should bear in our hearts the words of Jesus:
“Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you….
I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

The bishop Theophylact, writing in the 11th century, said
“He is the bread not of this ordinary life,
but of a very different kind of life,
which death will never cut short.”
But the true mystery of the Word made flesh
is that the bread of extraordinary life
is given to us mortals in this ordinary life,
the ordinary time of human history.
We seek out the bread of deathless life
amidst the ambiguities of the past,
power-plays and human failings,
stumbling efforts at human holiness
and the sanctified stubbornness of saints.
The task of the historical theologian as theologian
is to gather the manna scattered on the shifting sands of time,
which do not provide the comforting stability of abstraction.
We seek the bread of life that death will never cut short
in a confrontation with thinkers
possessed of mentalities very different from our own,
but with the confidence that because
they too hungered for food that never perishes,
they too thirsted for the living water,
it is not impossible that we can hear
echoed in their words
the one Word of life.
The chasm imposed by historical distance
cannot separate us from these friends,
not because we have honed
our skills of historical imagination—
though I hope we have done that—
and not because we have labored
to acquire facility with dead languages—
though I hope we have done that—
and not because of we have toiled
to gain paleographical skills—
though I hope people other than me have done that—
but because we, like they,
have been given to eat of the bread of life.
They, like us, have hungered and thirsted,
and they, like us, have been fed by Christ
with the bread of angels
so that the one Word might sound in their words.
We gather their words with care,
for it is the bread that the Lord has given us to eat.