A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 19, 2018
Proper 15C: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise. . . . Do not get drunk with wine, . . but be filled with the Spirit, . . . singing and making melody to the Lord in your heart. . . . (Eph. 5:15, 18)

That’s good advice. Let me commend it to you. As a choir person, I particularly like the part about “singing and making melody.”
But there’s also a kind of hidden trap here, one that we Christians have been falling into for centuries. We begin to think that being a Christian is all about behavior. Keep your nose clean. (Some would also say, “Keep a smile on your face.”) And you’re good.
Is that right? Is the Gospel really just about being good? Being good can actually turn into a real problem. When we get too attached to how good we are, we are apt to start using it to beat up on people we disagree with. Conservative Christians beat up on liberals who want dreadful things like wedding cakes for a gay marriage or a pink-and-blue cake to celebrate a transgender person. And, yes, we liberals beat up on conservatives for trying to impose their ideas on us and for what we see as their ignorance. And then we shun each other and avoid conversations because they might end in fights.
Not that the advice we hard from Ephesians is bad. Being good is, in fact, a good thing—you know, as opposed to a bad thing. But it’s not the central thing, not the great message of the gospel. It’s not the place where we need to start.

And where is the place to start? Our Psalm this morning gave us a good account of it:
Holy and awesome is God’s name.
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. . . .
We’re not talking about “fear” in the sense of “cowering behind the sofa and hoping not to be noticed.” Awe does indeed have an element of fear in it, but combined with an element of amazement, astonishment, fascination, the recognition of deep mystery—and also an element of feeling that we belong there. Awe recognizes God’s incalculable difference from us—not unlike the feeling you may get under a true, clear, starry night sky (if you can find one that’s not polluted by city lights) or looking out over the ocean on a really windy, foamy day or standing at the brink of a great canyon with the ground suddenly dropping away at your feet. Even if you know a lot about astronomy or meteorology or geology, you don’t just stand there and contentedly enjoy knowing the science of it all. You also have to deal with your own place in it—and with your own puniness, the puniness of humanity in general. That’s the awesomeness of that moment. It’s godly fear.
So awe is the place to begin—awe as we stand before the ungraspable mystery of God, experience the strangeness of God’s ways, recognize that this is not a world where we’re the ones in control. Yes, we have things to do that are worth doing, things that we can and need to do. But, no, we are not the ones ultimately in charge.

Our other two readings have something to say about this God we meet and this awe we feel. The story of Solomon is a textbook case in the strange ways God works. At first, we might take our reading from 1 Kings as a story of good behavior rewarded. Solomon made the right choice. He asked God for “an understanding mind” so that he would be a good ruler. And God rewarded him with that and much more besides.
Well, that’s part of Solomon’s story, but not all. As always, there are things that the lectionary leaves out. It has to leave some things out, of course, or we’d be in church all day. And it’s understandable if the less edifying bits sometimes drop by the wayside.
So let me remind you briefly of who Solomon was and how he came to the throne. He was the second son of David and Bathsheba. The first child died as punishment for David’s terrible crime of taking Bathsheba for himself and having her husband Uriah killed to cover things up—Uriah who was also David’s own loyal and trusting adjutant. Not an auspicious origin for a wise and godly king.
What’s more, Solomon came to the throne not by right of succession, but by means of a palace coup that sidelined various half-brothers who might well have had better claim on the throne than he. (Remember that the polygamous royal household of David looked more like with the modern Saudi family than, say, the House of Windsor—though the House of Saud, it seems, is generally better behaved than the House of David.) So, young as he was, Solomon would never have been king had not his mother been a superb and ruthless politician—something she’d had to learn to survive her own very difficult life.
So, yes, Solomon did make the right choice when he asked for understanding. But it’s clear that God isn’t motivated by the righteousness of Solomon’s origins or even his outstanding personal virtues. God is motivated . . . by what?
The great answer to that, throughout scripture, is that God is motivated by love, generosity, even, we might say, hope in our human potential. God has a way of choosing some very unlikely human partners—people no better than us: Jacob, the jealous younger brother who took advantage of his father’s blindness, for example, or Simon Peter, the awkward, impulsive fisherman. Solomon, the younger offspring of a notorious criminal act, put in place by a palace coup, fits the pattern. God doesn’t start with our goodness, but with God’s own love.
And the wonderful thing is that Solomon saw all this—had a sense of God’s mysterious greatness and generosity and a sense of his own inadequacy to the task he had been thrust into. And he had the humility to ask not just for goodies but for help. Awe before the mystery of God was the beginning of his wisdom—a much better fit, as it turns out, than simple good behavior would ever have been.

Now, if we turn to our reading from John’s Gospel, you wouldn’t think it has anything to do with my topic here. But, of course, it’s all about God’s love for us, even if we may be profoundly undeserving of it. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” Jesus says. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
This is the voice of God speaking. John took great pains at the beginning of his gospel to tell us that Jesus is the Word of God become flesh (1:1-14). When Jesus speaks here of “bread” and “flesh,” our minds tend to jump directly to the Eucharist: “This [bread] is my body, given for you.” That’s natural enough, given how well we know that story. But, oddly enough, John’s Gospel doesn’t include it. And, in this passage, John’s getting at something bigger and more basic.
God is saying here, “I am ready to feed you with my own life.” And it isn’t as if Jesus was talking to perfect good-doobies. His disciples were a motley assortment, as we know. And, in any case, he’s talking here to a whole crowd of people. Some of them were even his enemies. He’s not rewarding goodness. He’s offering people the self-giving generosity of God—the God who loves us even when we’re not behaving well, even when we fall far short of the good advice we read from Ephesians.
The Eucharist is the great sacrament of this. We receive this bread and wine with the kind of reverence and awe that we accord to God’s own self. But Jesus was talking here about something greater, more fundamental than the sacrament—about God’s indefatigable determination to do us good.
Our part is to accept it, like Solomon—to be fed by it and to build our lives on it. If we don’t, God won’t force it on us. You can’t compel love. But God will go on loving us and feeding us and hoping that eventually we’ll wake up to all this, feel the beauty and awe of God’s presence, and begin to learn wisdom.

So goodness is a good thing. But awe comes first. And then the gift—a gift to us from God, not the other way around. Then the accepting of that gift with gratitude. This is the beginning of wisdom. And as we grow in this wisdom, we may well find that other virtues grow along with it. We may even start behaving better. Just remember not to get a big head about it. Even our goodness is really a gift of God’s loving and awesome grace.

(The quotation from the Psalm is from The Saint Helena Psalter; other biblical quotations from NRSV.)