It Can Only Happen When You Eat

Romans 12: 9-13

A sermon by John D. Thornburg

September 3, 2006/ Spring Valley United Methodist Church

On Tuesday of this week, I was privileged to meet with seven other United Methodist clergy and Ann Sherer, the United Methodist bishop of Nebraska. These clergy are part of a group gathered together by the Texas Methodist Foundation because they show exceptional promise for leadership in the United Methodist Church in Texas.

The leaders of the foundation, which is basically a lending institution, knew that burned-out pastors generally don’t do a good job of helping their churches make mortgage payments. But instead of lamenting that reality, they pioneered an exciting program of clergy revitalization and leadership training. These are pastors who’ve been ordained somewhere between 4 and 7 years. That’s the window of time in which an alarming number of pastors drop out of ministry because they discover how hard it is or because they come to the difficult conclusion that they weren’t called to the work after all. Though this group, which I’ve privileged to lead, are new to ministry, they are not youngsters. Four of the seven are older than I am, so they’ve got some life experience under their belts. The group had determined that they wanted to have a day with one of the church’s bishops, in the hope of having candid conversation about the current strengths and weaknesses of the United Methodist Church. Bishop Sherer was the perfect choice because she’s clear in her opinions, but very open to the voices of all who come her way.

In the course of the conversation, one of the pastors expressed his dismay to the bishop that a staff member of our denomination’s social concerns agency had publicly criticized President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq. Because this pastor generally supports the President’s approach to the war on terror, he was dismayed that this national staff person should express the opinions he did, given that our national staffers are, rightly or wrongly, seen as representing the views of the United Methodist Church. You should know that this pastor was a career Air Force officer who had spent almost 20 years in the area of counter terrorism.

The room got very quiet. It was clear that some in the room were raised never to confront someone in authority, and they were really surprised to see their colleague be so directly confrontational with a bishop of the church. For others, it was that as fond as they were of the pastor personally, they did not agree with his views on the war. But whatever it was, the silence was thick enough to cut with a knife. Though the conversation for the remainder of the afternoon was civil, it was clear that there was some uneasiness in the air.

When our afternoon session was done, we ate together. As often happens over food, the tone of the conversation moved to matters of family. We swapped stories about children and grandchildren. There were a few vacation stories and some tall tales about parishioners from hell.

And then a remarkable thing happened. The same pastor who had questioned the bishop earlier started to speak of what it had been like for him to come home from Vietnam and face people who would not even speak to him. He said that he rarely felt comfortable in church, sensing that people viewed him as someone who had participated in a war that simply wasn’t justified.

We all agreed that we felt that Americans had learned a hard lesson from Vietnam about the treatment of returning soldiers and that these days people were better able to separate their support of individual soldiers from whatever their feelings were about the conflict. But then, in one of the lulls in the conversation, one of the members of the group said, “I’ve never had the opportunity to speak to a soldier and to say, ‘I admire your courage and I thank you for your selfless service to our nation, but because I oppose the policies under which the current conflict is being waged, I don’t want you to have to die for me’, so I’ve never had the opportunity to have a soldier say to me, ‘I do support the policies and objectives of this conflict, and so I am willing to die for you.”

What then happened was nothing short of God-given. The pastor who had spent so many years in counter terrorism was willing and able to talk about the depths of depravity he had seen among the terrorist groups he had been assigned to combat, and another member of the group was willing to talk about his feeling that Christ’s example of facing death on a cross as a means of fighting evil was what compelled him to oppose the current conflict in Iraq. The conversation was intense, full of vulnerability, and marked by respect.

I had such a jumble of feelings. I was joyful that we could be so candid with each other. There was grace in the room. There was a level of respect and listening that we hadn’t achieved before as a group. But I was so sad that the kind of conversation we were having had taken two years of meetings as a group to occur. But I must admit that my greatest sadness came from knowing that the type of conversation we were having is almost totally absent from our churches.

We’ve fallen victim to the entertainment orientation of our culture and our media in which what gets reported is not the substance of things, but who opposed who, and how outrageous the statements were. So it isn’t about whether the conflict in Iraq is the best means of combating terrorism. It’s about whether we heard it on Fox News or on NPR, because, after all, if it was on Fox News, it’s nothing but pro-Bush propaganda, and if we heard it on NPR, it’s nothing but effete liberalism.

And in the midst of those mixed feelings, I heard these extraordinarily convicting words of Paul in Romans 12, “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor.”

The fact that there is almost no conversation in our churches about the war in Iraq or about the role of the United States in combating terrorism is a regrettable sign that our love for each other is not genuine; it’s cautious and guarded. And that’s not love; it’s courtesy, and there is a vast difference between those two things. Courtesy is meant to control a situation; to make certain that nothing gets out of hand. Love is not love if it seeks to control someone else.

Loving each other with mutual affection means that I am called to know who you are, to understand why you think the way you do, to honor the things that have formed you, to respect your experiences. Loving each other with mutual affection is not about getting our point across; it’s about opening my life to you and being ready for you to open your life to me. Loving each other with mutual affection is not about winning an argument or defending my point of view; it’s about bringing the fullness of who I am to our conversation, meeting the fullness of who you are, and seeing what God will do with us.

When the conversation was drawing to a close on Tuesday, I said to the group, “I wonder if the only way conversation like this is possible is if we eat together.” I was perfectly serious. When we eat together, we acknowledge our humanness. We’re all hungry. We can’t live without eating, and we are all dependent on God for the food we eat.

Jesus knew that something is possible while we eat together that may not be possible at other times. That’s why so much of his teaching came in and around meals. It’s why when his life was coming to a close, he chose a meal to give the most incredible indication of how to live together. He said, “When you eat, remember me.”

We will eat together today. It will be a sign of our oneness. We’re all hungry. We’re all desperately hungry for the love that only Jesus can teach us. But isn’t it possible that we can take the blessing of this meal to other meals; meals that are not eaten at an altar rail? Isn’t it possible that the blessing we receive at the meal here today can give us the strength to be people whose love is genuine? Isn’t it possible that a meal of meat loaf and potatoes in someone’s home could be the place in which we finally feel safe enough to address our differences, and in addressing them, find that God is there sighing with joy that we’ve finally realized that we’re in this adventure called life together?