Grace Cathedral

“We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn. 6).

Sometimes we have the sense that what we are living is not our true life. We become aware of this in various ways.¹ It might be a sense of longing for something different, or a lingering dissatisfaction with what is. Perhaps we feel false or fake. We may begin to notice it in our own behavior or how we respond to those around us. We might think to ourselves, “Was that me?” “Did I say that?” Our bodies speak to us. During a tense time my back aches and I can suddenly drop ten pounds in a month.

Sometimes we are not really living our own life because of other people’s expectations for us. I think about this a lot as a priest. I especially felt this pressure as a teenager and in my early twenties. LGBTQ+ people have taught me a lot about how much the expectations of society can warp and distort how we live.

In our congregation survey we received a note from a young person who lives in a town with a population of 12,000 on Highway 99 south of Fresno. He writes that in 2016 he was in a church that was pressuring him to vote for Donald Trump, that he found himself suddenly expelled from a leadership class “because I am not straight.” He made his way here even though we are three hours away. He writes that he loves Grace Cathedral because we are, “inclusive and standup [against] social injustice. No church in my town does this and there are 27 churches. Thank you!”²

This week a friend from the congregation wondered aloud if we are living in a simulation like the movie, The Matrix. We talked about God as what is most real. In this youthful, beautiful San Francisco, the poet May Sarton’s (1912-1995) reflections about growing older might be particularly helpful. She writes, “Now I become myself. It’s taken / time, many years and places. / I have been dissolved and shaken, / Worn other people’s faces.”³ Perhaps you have worn another’s face too.

Fear also makes it difficult to live our true life. It is almost impossible to be yourself when you are afraid. That is why poverty, racism and violence cause so much more damage than we expect. Not long after we arrived here our family went on a tour of the Cathedral. We climbed the stairs to the highest reaches above us, with the labyrinth far

below. When I watched my wife Heidi and the children step out onto the catwalk, I felt a yawning pit in my stomach. I felt embarrassed, but knew I had to turn back to a place where I couldn’t see what they were doing. So I missed that part of our day together.

This is a metaphor for what happens with us socially. Fear makes us miss out. When we were in our twenties our house burned down and a very good friend took us in for a few nights. We kept in touch and years later when we were in graduate school together I gave a response to a paper she wrote for a small seminar. She was so angry. She refused to ever meet with me to talk about it. Fear of falling off the catwalk may be an irrational fear, but fear of breaking the relationships that are most important in our life is very reasonable.

This is a special problem for Christians. We have come to see that the truth lies not in asserting our own power but in the way of Jesus. Through Jesus we experience ourselves as God’s children. We try to love God first and our neighbor as ourselves. We do not always have to be right. We feel a new kind of freedom as we rely on God’s forgiveness. We do not have to make everything happen ourselves. We can allow ourselves to rely on God. And when we most need it, often we feel Jesus walking along with us or in the people at places like this.

Others talk as if Christianity is simply an idea in our heads but it is not. Our faith becomes the basis for how we see the world and in turn the decisions that direct us. In the long run faith forms our habits. Faith is an action which leads to what Paul calls “the peace that passes all understanding” (Phil. 4:7).

Many of us experience this all the way down. The story of God, that vision for living our true life, is deeply rooted in our unconscious. And yet in our age Christians have an especially difficult time living what we are. We have learned to put on a secular mask, to in effect hide what we know is true.

When our son was a student at a large public high school he told me that he would almost never talk about religion. He says that people there so fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be a believer that he just didn’t bother to try to explain. He says that so much of what they say about Christianity comes out of a deep ignorance about what it means to walk with Christ. They have so many incorrect assumptions (about a literal reading of the Bible, our opinions about people of other faiths, our position on social issues, etc.) that they just cannot imagine what it would be like to believe in Jesus.

But there is more to this than just ignorance. They are offended not just by what we say but by who we are as Christians.⁴ I give non-Christians credit. We have done and continue to do a lot to make ourselves misunderstood. But even this does not account for how offended the world is in the face of our message, the good news.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus experiences this offense himself. He talks about people who abide in him, people who are so near to him that it is as if they had eaten his flesh and drunk his blood. He goes on to say that, “the one who eats this bread will live forever” (Jn. 6). He then calls God “the Father” and claims that it is God who draws people to him.

It is hard to know from this short reading exactly which of these disturbing claims offended the people. But John writes, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.” I have no idea how to read it, but Jesus seems hurt when he asks, “the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’”

You might have your own theory both about this story and about the offense that Christianity causes some people. I want briefly to describe what three other Christians have thought about offense.

1. My friend Herman Waetjen is Professor Emeritus of biblical studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary. Herman gets right to the point. He says the offense comes from shocking images, from the way that Jesus connects cannibalism to the nation’s founding story of the Passover meal (before the people of God escaped slavery in Egypt).

Herman points out that Jesus is not calling for Israel to become the new overlords, but wants to “terminate all forms of domination.” Instead of sacrificing a lamb Jesus insists that we sacrifice ourselves for the liberation of all people and the whole creation.⁵

2. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) took the idea of offense very seriously. Kierkegaard mentions two sources for offense. He believes that we cannot know the infinite without giving up our finitude. At the same time it is the nature of human reason to try to go beyond itself, to try to think what cannot be thought. Offense comes from the pain of desiring something that is impossible for us.⁶

Kierkegaard also suggests that human beings prefer teachers like Socrates who says that the truth is already in us, to teachers like Jesus who is an essential part of the message he conveys. It is not enough for us to simply know what Jesus explains. Because we keep falling back, we depend on a continuing relation with him. This offends our desire for independence, to choose our own way apart from God.⁷

3. Finally, the theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) points out two different kinds of knowledge. There is what he calls controlling knowledge which depends on objectivity and is the way that a person treats the world as full of things to be used. He writes, “controlling knowledge claims control of every level of reality. [It says that] Life, spirit, personality, community, meanings, values, even one’s ultimate concern, should be treated in terms of detachment, analysis, calculation, technical use.”

For many people today this is the only kind of truth. They are offended by what Tillich calls “receiving knowledge,” the subjective or the emotional experience which “takes the object into itself, into union with the subject.” Much of what we encounter in religion changes the one who is experiencing it, and that is part of its truth.⁸

Waetjen, Kierkegaard and Tillich each give us a different picture of the offense that Christians experience in talking about Jesus. Maybe at the most basic level people realize that believing in Jesus means that we have to change our life.

The Apostle Paul offended people enough to be called “an ambassador in chains” (Eph. 6). In words that transformed my life as a teenager, he says that faith, kindness to others, the spirit of God all act as defensive armor, as what he calls “the shield of faith.” This armor protect us from being harmed. It allows us to be ourselves, to live the way that our hearts are calling us to live. God will give us what we need. In John Calvin’s words, “nothing which pertains to our safety will ever be wanting.”⁹

So this week I want to suggest a simple homework assignment. The first part is for each of us to speak to someone, maybe even someone here today, about our experience with offense. The second part is to have at least one moment of boldness when we are not embarrassed of our faith or try to hide it from someone who is important to us.

Our life is too precious, too short, not to fully live.

Let me conclude with an excerpt from a poem by Mary Oliver called “When Death Comes.” “When Death comes / like the hungry bear in autumn… I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: / what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?…” “When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. // When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder / if I have made of my life something particular, and real. // I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, / or full of argument. // I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”¹⁰

Are you living what is truly your life?

¹ This idea comes from the first chapter of Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2000) 1ff.

² “Around 2016 I was in a church in my hometown of _____ that was very homophobic and wanted me to vote for trump. I was in leadership teaching classes and I was told I could not because I am not straight when I told everyone at church that I would not vote for trump. I did not know beforehand that this church was like this. It was very traumatic and I made my way to grace again even tho you are three hours away from me. When I am in SF which is normally several times a year I do come to the in person services. I appreciate that you are inclusive and stand up to social injustices. No church in _______ does this. And we have 27 churches lol. Thank you !” Grace Cathedral Community Survey, 7/26/2024.

³ May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself,” in Collected Poems (1930-1993) (NY: Norton, 1993) 162.

⁴ In 2015, I gave a talk in Silicon Valley on Theology and Artificial Intelligence. Almost everyone there treated me very well, but a few confronted me with a bitterness that is more than just simply ignorance. I could not have generated that anger if I had been speaking about a complicated algorithm or biological phenomena.

⁵ “In place of the traditional Passover Meal that failed in nurturing liberation and perpetuated only living death, Jesus, with great irony, is offering a new Passover Meal in which its participants sacrifice themselves for the liberation of each other and all their fellow human beings, but always out of their own liberated sovereignty.” Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple: A Work in Two Editions (NY: T & T Clark, 2005) 219, 220.

⁶ Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments or a Fragment of Philosophy tr. David Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942) 18-42.

⁷ Ibid., Chapter II “God as Teacher and Saviour: An Essay of the Imagination,” 17-28.

⁸ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) 97-105.

⁹ John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion, 1.14.22.

¹⁰ Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 10-11.