I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 28, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are 2 Samuel 11:1-15 and John 6:1-21.
Now, I tend to think that I was a pretty nice, friendly kid growing up—I liked being around people, including my mom and dad and my other relatives. But there’s a funny thing that happens to most of us, somewhere around the age of 14 or so—we suddenly want our parents and the rest of our family members to leave us alone.
I was not a very rebellious teenager, but still, somewhere around that age, I became totally uninterested in what the rest of my family was up to. I couldn’t drive yet, and this was long before the age of smartphones, but I would still check out and close myself up in my room, reading books or talking to my friends on the phone or surfing the internet (the kind that you had to connect to on a landline).
And yet, for some reason, my family would keep pestering me! My dad would knock on the door to tell me dinner was ready, or my mom would call and want to know how school was going. One time my grandma got mad at me because I had been on the dialup internet for so long that no one could make calls in or out of the house.
I was just convinced that their whole mission in life was to cramp my style. The nerve of these people. Didn’t they understand that I was my own person, that I needed space to do exactly what I wanted to do, when and how I wanted to do it?!
If you happen to be going through that right now as a teenager, I want to say, you’re not entirely wrong. There is something really important about figuring out who you are as a person and how that might be different from the expectations of all the people around you. Figuring ourselves out takes time and trial and error and you need a little space to do that.
It’s also true, though, many years on from 14, that now I would give just about anything to have my dad knock on the door to call me to dinner or to hear my grandma fussing at me about the busy signal on the phone. Maybe it’s just a function of getting older—the prospect of being on one’s own loses a bit of its luster.
Nonetheless, it strikes me that our relationship with God is a bit like the push-pull of growing up and feeling both grateful for and claustrophobic around the ones we love.
I know it’s very pious to talk about how much we love to spend time with God, and we say a lot in church about how wonderful it is that God came to be with us in the flesh in Jesus, how he will never leave us, how he is always there when we call on him.
But in the midst of all of that, I think we need to be honest with ourselves: there is a part of us that might prefer for our Lord to leave us alone once in a while. There is a part of us that finds it awfully exhausting and burdensome to have the Way, the Truth, and the Life constantly knocking on the door, reminding us we are spending too much time closed up in our rooms, asking us to get off our phones and come out and be part of the human family.
The nerve of this Divine Person! Doesn’t he know that I need space to do exactly what want to do, when and how I want to do it? It would be so much easier if we could just stay in our own little world rather than contend with the real world.
In this week’s reading from the Old Testament, David is caught up in this tendency towards self-isolation, and unfortunately for him it comes at great cost. The implication of the text we heard today is that, as King, he should have been out there in solidarity with the troops who are fighting his battles, but instead he chooses to stay home and take advantage of his newfound royal power, using it to exploit and manipulate others for no reason other than his own idle satisfaction.
If that reading made you uncomfortable, good—that’s the point. David and those like him are not our savior; God is. We will return to this story next week and we will learn the grave cost of his actions, but for now we simply see in David the terrible danger of cutting ourselves off from a sense of responsibility to the people around us—of assuming that God doesn’t care what we do with our time. David will soon learn that, like any annoyingly persistent parent, God does indeed care, and God is not inclined to leave us to our own devices forever, even when we would rather he did.
And, at the risk of sounding really impious, there is no greater evidence of God’s annoying, parental persistence than the incarnation of Jesus. He just had to come down and get up in our business. He just had to come knock on our door to tell us to get off the internet for a minute and open our eyes and look at each other and listen to one another.
Yes, God becoming flesh and walking among us and revealing to us the urgent necessity of embodying the Father’s love—let’s get real for a minute here—it’s beautiful and revelatory, but it’s also quite inconvenient.
Because, Lord, I don’t want to love my enemies! Lord, I don’t want to relinquish my own ambitions and self-interest for the greater good! Lord, I don’t want to face the suffering of the world and realize that I am expected to actually do something about it. I just want to be left alone! Stop knocking on my door, please. Stop calling me up and telling me that I was made for something more. Just let me put on my headphones and talk to the people I like and leave the rest for someone else to figure out!
Thankfully God doesn’t listen to me when I say that, anymore than my parents or grandparents ever did. Because Jesus is, as God always has been, the one who says, no, it’s time you come and have something to eat. It’s time you rejoined the land of the living. It’s time you remembered that you are, indeed, part of a family—the family of all of creation—and while we all need a bit of solitude and self-exploration from time to time, you were not made to be alone.
Jesus showing up here in our midst, week after week, in the form of bread and wine, showing up to knock on the door of your heart, is not just a pretty idea—it’s a reminder of that frustratingly persistent tendency of God to never leave us be, to never give up on us, to wait for us, all of us, however long it takes, until we realize that this—this love, this way of life, this relationship with God and with each other—is what we needed most all along, at age 4, and at 14, and at 104.
Because there will be a moment that comes for each of us, at a certain age, when we look up and realize that, like those disciples on the Sea of Galilee, we have been rowing our boat alone on the waves for a bit too long, and the waters around us are stormy, and we are far from home, and now we would give anything to hear our father or our mother or our grandmother’s voices instead of the howling wind. And then, quite suddenly, there is Jesus, coming across the water, saying It is I, do not be afraid.
Annoyingly, stubbornly, blessedly, miraculously, he has followed us the whole way, out past our pride, out past our loneliness and bewilderment. He has refused to leave us to our own devices, even when we thought we wanted him to.
I hope that, following in Jesus’ footsteps, I can be just as annoyingly persistent in my own commitment to caring for others and the world around me. I’d like to think that this is what are about here at St. Anne, that this is what we are celebrating today on St. Anne Day.
I pray that, as we do this more and more and more, there are folks out there in our community who might start to say, oh gosh, there go those St. Anne people again, always inviting everyone to come to the table, always advocating for justice and mercy, always going on about how much God loves everyone, always trying to call us back into relationship with one another. When will they let up with all of that? When will they leave me to my own devices? When will they give up on that annoying, persistent hope in something better for this world?
Never, my friends.
I pray the answer is never.
By Another Road 