Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b | Ephesians 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32 | John 6:60-69

Oh God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise that amid the uncertainties of this world our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

I’ve said to you often that the opening prayer sets the tone for whatever a man like me, wanting to communicate to you what these readings mean — it just sets the tone, and it’s saying what I want from God.  Would God please, please give me this?  Give me this, God, and that is I want to understand what you ask of me, what you command me to do.  And I want you to remind me always what it promises when you say I need to do what you command, and then you also promise me that there’s going to be a gift, something wonderful.  I love the way that opening prayer sets it in this way.  It says the world is filled with uncertainties.  We turn to the world for understanding, for protection, for all the things that we need, and we know that it’s wanting.  So we need something, something that we can go to that’s going to nurture us and remind us of a promise that there is a place where we can find wholeness, gladness, joy.  So with that focus for the homily, we’re going to be looking at what is it we turn to, to give us some kind of sense of stability and strength in the midst of all the uncertainties we deal with. 

Let’s take the first reading, because the first reading says everything about who God is, not so much about what people are supposed to do for him but who he is.  Joshua has gathered all the people together, and what’s interesting about gathering the people together, it’s the ordinary folks, but it’s also everybody that has any kind of authority over them.  So there’s everybody, judges, leaders, elders, and they all gather together.  And he wants to say something to them, and he’s basically saying, “All right, you need to be able to turn to a source that’s bigger than any individual or any other of these authorities that I’m gathering together.  Everyone needs to turn to a power beyond themselves and invite that power to come into them.”  Now, whether Joshua understood or the people understood all that that meant, but what he was saying, “I want you to choose the God that you believe in, that you trust in, because that’s going to say everything about who you are and what you want in the world.  The God you serve is going to be the one that has formed you, given you everything.”  So what you hear in this story is what’s the motive for surrendering to the authority of someone.  Well, it’s not just because they’re the boss.  It’s because you see this authority giving you something that you couldn’t have on your own.  You’re being served by it, and so these people are saying, “Okay, if we think about it, who do we want to serve, a false god or a God who’s taken care of us and shown us all kinds of kindnesses and fed us and is guiding us on a journey?  He’s been taking care of us.  Why would we pick another God?  So we’ll serve the God who serves us.”  And that’s exactly what we do.  The God we choose, the truth we choose to live by is a truth that we believe, when we choose it, it will produce for us everything that we long for, everything we want, everything we need.  And yet the truth is there’s only one truth.  There’s only one God.  

There’s only one message, and everything else seems perhaps valuable and interesting and something we desire, depending on what we believe in, depending on how we see the world, but here’s the weakness of human nature.  It was there at the very beginning in the story of Adam and Eve.  What was Adam and Eve’s basic sin?  I’ve said this to you over and over again.  Autonomy.  God said, “Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.   Don’t ever think that you can have an understanding and a complete comprehension of what is and then you determine the rules and laws, you yourself will set them.”  An autonomous person is free of any outside authority, any outside law, and they can create a world of their own making.  It’s like an author can write a novel, and a novel can be a comedy or a tragedy.  And basically he can do that.  Then he has a book, but basically the image of that that’s terrifying to me is we can write our own book.  But then the danger is that we expect like to then be like that book, and the things we’re choosing, that we believe will promise us fullness and wholeness, if it’s not true, if it’s not real, if it’s fiction, then you’re in trouble.  

So that’s the fundamental issue in terms of what Jesus asks, or when anyone asks, or when you ask yourself the question: “What do I believe in?  What do I believe in?  What God is the God that’s guiding me and directing me and showing me how I should live?”  Well, it’s the God that serves.  That’s one way to look at it.  What is it that brings me the most joy and the most satisfaction?  Well, depending upon your level of consciousness, you may pick something pretty lowdown, like saying, “When I get everything I want, then that’s the only time I’m happy.”  But if you live in that long enough, you lose it.  So let’s hope you have a higher consciousness where you realize, “You know what?  I really don’t know what will make me completely content and happy, but if I pay attention to what does, I begin to see it.”  And it has something to do — like that great mystery that Paul reveals about marries.  Everything that God is asking you to live in, when it comes to a truth, is not just about yourself and God, but mostly about you and your neighbor, you and yourself.  All of his commands, his commandments are about your relationship to God and your relationship to each other.  So basically the wisdom that God wants to give you is the wisdom that will enable you to live in the world as it is, as he has created it, and it’s going to be a lot like a marriage.  And a healthy marriage is when husbands love their wives as they do themselves; wives love their husbands as they do themselves.  They’ll listen to each other.  That’s what the word obey means, to each other, and they will grow from each other’s experiences.  And they will be able somehow to feel that they are to each other something so valuable that you want to give back to it, because it’s constantly giving to you.  That’s the ideal, to live in that kind of world.  And so what Jesus is inviting us into is that kind of world, but then there’s something else he has to do for us.

To tell us there’s a world out there that’s truthful and, when we’re in it and living it, we’re going to be able to find all the gladness and all the joy we want, well, the problem is human beings have never been designed to be able to do that on their own.  You’re not given that gift at birth.  No, it had to be won for you.  It had to be given to you, and so when Jesus is talking to his disciples in the gospel and he’s asking them, “Look, there are a lot of other ways to live out there.  I know you have choices.  I know you can turn away from me.  I know the things I’m explaining to you are so tough.”  He’d just been saying, “Eat my body, and drink my blood.”  And they’re saying, “I don’t understand any of this.”  So Jesus is talking to them as if they had the capacity to understand what he’s saying, and Jesus knew in his heart they couldn’t understand it yet.  They couldn’t.  They had to be given something, and the whole story of salvation history is what they’re given is given in this thing called redemption, Jesus dying on the cross and, through this death, somehow empowering human beings to see more than they ever could see, understand more than they could ever understand and be closer to their true nature than ever before.  And when that happened at Pentecost, the disciples went from frightened young men that didn’t know quite what they believed and didn’t know quite how they could ever accomplish what they were going to do, if they were going to do it, and they weren’t sure they were going to do it, they were like the rest of us most of the time.  And then redemption happened, and boom, they changed, and all of a sudden they saw it.  They understood it, and their understanding was like a power of communication.  Everybody understood everybody, because there was one truth everybody was immersed in.  It’s the beauty of living in a community that is grounded in what is real and what is true, and the key is you’re living in a community where everyone is serving everyone else.  

So there’s a line that I really want to focus on in this gospel, because it’s the one that I think may be most confusing to a lot of people.  We’re talking about faith, believing in the truth of who you are and what will make you happy, and the point is that, in that very thing that you’ve been given, where do you get the conviction?  Can you prove it?  Do you have examples that are the opposite of it?  Absolutely.  So what Jesus is saying in this gospel is that God has to give you something that you don’t have, and if you don’t have it, you’ll not be able to comprehend and live what I’m asking you to live.  So basically what he says, “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him.”  Well, how does God draw you to him?  He has this gift of redemption.  What is redemption?  The Spirit enters into us.  What is the Spirit?  Wisdom, understanding, knowledge.  We have to have some core intuition.  I’ll call it first in a negative way.  We have to have some intuition that the things the world presents to us, power, control over people and all that stuff, as exciting and as interesting as all that is, it’s never going to work.  How do you know that in your gut?  Do you have to go through 1,000 experiences?  I hope not.  Collectively, whenever we go through a bunch of experiences as a human race, we grow, and we change.  We evolve, but what I’m saying is there was something that happened at the time that Jesus died on the cross that lifted us to a higher level of a capacity to understand the mystery of what it is that finds — that gets us to the place we need to be, and it’s not by writing our own story.  It’s not being the author of life.  It’s not being autonomous.

Isn’t it interesting that the freedom we long for, that’s so core to our body, almost gets interpreted like, “Well, if we’re free to be who we want to be and who we need to be, we’re also free to decide what that is.”  No.  Yeah, you’re free to accept the journey toward that which brings wholeness only if you awaken yourselves and open yourselves to the reality of a gift that comes from God.  Some people don’t call it God.  They might call it an insight to what is real and what is true.  Think about that: something given to you by God, through his death on the cross, that enables you to have in your core a compass that has the right direction branded in you.  Now you have something to guide you, to take you, and what it’s going to take you on is a journey with a God who is not only inviting you into a place of wisdom and knowledge and therefore joy but is taking you on a journey where it’s going to take you — it’s going to require of you a deep conviction that the path is going to be challenging, and the key to getting through the path is trust — trust, belief, because belief is not just that God exists or the law exists.  It’s I have within me — because of God I believe that I have within me the capacity to find what I need, what I want.  I call that God’s presence.  Most of us name it God.  The reason we allow it is because we know that the intention of this God is that he will give us something that will guide us and give us this focus of where to go and where to find the things that we need.  So belief is not just he exists, but he has a purpose in his existence.  And it’s the answering into us, which is redemption, the possibility of God entering into us, living inside of us, guiding us on a regular basis.  And you know what? 

The greatest thing that faith promises is not just that you’ll see this as a way of understanding it, but you will experience it — experience it.  Until we feel the service of God living inside of us, giving us life, and that’s given to us in glimpses, it never really becomes quite as real as it’s intended to be.  

So bottom line, we have to serve someone.  So serve the God who has taken care of you, guided you, given you life, given you a destiny.  If you believe all that, you’ll serve him without ever questioning it.  And when you’re in that, you’re going to feel his service, but usually it starts, because we’re human, with him serving us first.  Taste that and know it will never stop.  That’s the gift of faith, so much more than just a flat, “I guess God does exist.”  No, he lives in you and powers you, awakens you, and you’re a new person.  Let us pray.

 Father, we are weak. We are longing for your strength and your support, and that support comes in the form of awareness. Bless us with greater knowledge of who you are, how you work within us, the promises that you’ve made, the support you give us so we can see you as you are, believe in you as you are, and find the gladness that is our inheritance. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.