I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 25, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 6:56-69.
As most of you know, my dad’s side of the family lived in a small town in the woods of upper Michigan. I talk about that place a lot, in sermons and in stories, and I think about it a lot too, because it inhabits that place in my heart where one finds something true and good to hold onto as the years go by.
Because as a kid in California who moved around a lot, Iron River, MI, (population 2,000) was an unconventional promised land of sorts: a place where the doors always stood open and porches creaked hospitably when you stepped on them and streets were paved in golden sunlight. It was (and to some extent remains for me) a sort of dream. Maybe you have your own such place, somewhere within your own heart and history. A particular golden landscape. A door that always stood open for you.
But for my family who actually lived full time in Iron River—and especially my grandpa, Russ, who lived there his entire life—it was not a dream. It was simply where he lived, and where his family had always lived, for generations. He loved it in his own practical way, but I think it’s safe to say it did not dazzle or tantalize him like it did me. No, for my grandpa, the promised land was another place entirely. It was…Montana.
If you’ve been you know that Montana is a stunning place, especially in the western half where the mountains are like green teeth chewing the sky, with lakes as still as glass mirrors reflecting the faces of the big thunderhead clouds. And while I was busy dreaming of Michigan, it was Montana that had long fueled the daydreams of my grandpa. So much so that at one point, when my dad and his siblings were young, he attempted to move the family out there.
It didn’t work out, and they soon returned back to Michigan, but for as long as I can remember, he would get a sort of dreamy, wistful sound in his voice whenever he talked about the big sky and the small western towns and that one particular diner in eastern Montana that had the best tomato soup known to God or humankind.
But ultimately, while my grandpa loved the idea of Montana, the freedom and adventure it represented to him, it was Michigan that was home for his entire life, until he died at the age of 89. It was that one small Michigan town where he swept hallways as a janitor and drove buses and went fishing and paid bills and fixed broken things down in the basement while puffing on his little cigars.
And while he might have dreamt of the wind singing in the pines on some far off Montana peak, it was in Michigan where he sang songs to his grandchildren and watched us grow up to dream our own dreams.
I was thinking about all of this—Michigan and Montana and the places that tantalize us and the regular places where we make a life—because I have realized that it parallels and illuminates something really important about our lives of faith. In particular, I’ve been thinking about that very word, faith.
When I say the word faith–when I ask you to talk about your faith–what would you say in reply?
Typically, we would start to talk about what we believe—what we think—about who God is and how God acts in the world. Faith is the word people often use to describe their attitude towards the Bible and Jesus and whether they think he is who he says he is. And so, if I say I have found my faith, it means I think one thing about Jesus. And if I have lost my faith, it means I think something else.
Faith, understood in this way, is very conceptual; it’s an idea that we wrestle with. It is sort of like Montana was for my grandpa—this lovely but not quite solid thing that rattles around in our head, a vision that remains always just out of reach.
But what I have realized is that Jesus is not all that interested in this sort of faith. I don’t think he came just to tantalize us with concepts or give us more fuel to endlessly debate ideas about God. He came to give us something real, something tangible. He came to give our actual lives back to us.
Because Jesus teaches, time and again, that the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place hidden beyond the horizon. It is the ground beneath our feet, made holy by our daily choices. It is the temple of the present moment, open to all who recognize here, now as the place where we meet God.
At the risk of sounding overly provocative, I am suggesting that Christian life is less about faith and more about fidelity—the commitments we make and the promises we keep, where love looks less like a map to a far off place and more like an object mended in the basement. In this Christian way of life, we commit not so much to an idea as we do to a set of choices made and acted upon. Choices that build a sense of home and hope for ourselves and the people around us.
That’s why Jesus is so insistent about bread and flesh and blood in this discourse we’ve been hearing for the past few weeks. He is telling his disciples, and us: stop treating all of this—what I am doing, what I am saying, what I am teaching—like it’s an idea that you can take or leave. God is not an idea. Love is not a theory or a concept or an ideology. It is the fundamental substance of existence.
And until we realize this–until we realize that God is not an idea and heaven is not a dream destination, but the enactment of our daily fidelity to love–until we claim this, we do not have life in us. Not truly, not fully, not yet.
And so if you are ever looking to check in with God about your discipleship, about how things are going between the two of you, I would encourage you to spend less time agonizing over your doubts or relishing your certainties and spend more time asking: to what or to whom have I given my fidelity? What choices am I making? What relationships am I building? What simple, practical work am I doing to love the ground beneath my feet in the name of Jesus?
I daresay that the Gospel of Christ has endured for over 2000 years less because of the triumph of an idea and more because certain people in each generation decided, as Jesus did, to put some flesh on their love—they decided to stop talking and actually live the gospel out. To give their own bodies and selves as living bread for the life of the world. Even if it just looks, most of the time, like fixing broken things, paying the bills, sweeping the hallway, and singing to your grandchildren.
You know, I have sometimes wondered, when my grandpa died and went to be with God, what it looked like for him when he got there. I wondered if it looked like Montana..that maybe he got there at last and finally found himself at home in the high peaks, bathed in wind and cloud and Spirit.
But if I am honest, I bet his homecoming looked more familiar than that—that heaven is more like being enfolded back into the love we spend our life on.
And so maybe, just maybe, in some quiet, woodsy corner of heaven, he is still tinkering in the basement, still singing in the night, or driving down a quiet highway, headed not towards Montana or any ineffable dream, but to the place where God actually abides—the place that looks like flesh and blood and fidelity. The place that looks like home.
By Another Road 