Sermon for All Saints-by-the-Sea, The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 24, 2010
by the Reverend Rob Fisher

Texts: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

One of my favorite books is about a street. 

It was published in 1945, and is called Cannery Row.

In it, John Steinbeck writes about a street called Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, a hub of life, swirling with activity during the Great Depression.  Steinbeck himself spent a great deal of time there with his close friend, Ed Ricketts, who operated a marine biology lab and ocean specimen collection business in his home, set between the canneries.

The street is still there, and many of the old buildings remain.  The former residents are long gone, and sadly—rather than disappearing quietly as they were meant to—they left in their wake numerous themed gifts shops, statues, banners, and even a wax museum.  If you look between the wine-tasting rooms and T-shirt shops you will still find a vacant lot here and there, with old rusting boilers discarded from the canneries from the days when they were in full operation.  During the hard times of the Depression, some of those retired boilers served as cheap housing.  Steinbeck writes about how their shape sometimes amplified snoring of the tenants in such a way as to wake them up at night.

Steinbeck was a world-class story teller and observer of people, but what makes his book about Cannery Row so special is the way he paints a picture of how lives come together to create something that resembles a single living organism.

Today, you can see the skeleton that remains of the organism that once was alive there, but the street and its buildings are nothing more than a physical setting.  The community was the flesh upon those bones—the Wing Chong Market, for instance—perhaps the nervous center—and Ed Rickett’s biological lab—a place where healing, reflection and occasional celebration took place. 

Like the brains or the heart of a body.

Steinbeck was an amateur marine biologist—who clearly lived vicariously through his friend—and he describes the life of this community with the enthusiasm and wonder that a student of the oceans would have in describing the life found in a tidepool.

He describes the many parts of the community, with an appreciation for how it came together as one ebbing and flowing whole, cooperating with itself for its own survival, growth, and learning.

Though Steinbeck wrote about the warts and vices heartily, he must have been a romantic as he ended with a picture that is full of grace.  Steinbeck, a fallen Episcopalian, apparently saw the Spirit flowing among these people.  And to him, it was ultimately a thing of inspiration and beauty.

***

Are we one, or are we many? 

Are we somehow both at the same time?

Paul writes to the Corinthians:

“Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.  For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

This thought is jarring to the Modern Western mindset. 

We are individuals, of course!  We are responsible for ourselves.  I am responsible for my actions, just as you are responsible for yours.

But let’s think on a biological level for a moment. 

What gives each of us life and sustenance?

Among other things, we need air to breathe in order to live.

And the air that I inhale as oxygen and soon exhale as CO2 will eventually become oxygen again and may be inhaled by you, giving your body life.  We are sharing air with one another all the time.  We never even think about it, but it is essential to being alive.

Though we are individuals, our many physical bodies share this air, flowing not just within us but among us.

Likewise, we share the water of the earth, and its nutrients as well. 

In a very real, physical sense, we are one organism, though many.

Even more so spiritually—we are given life by the same Spirit.

What gives my soul life—not just what gives my body life—makes me a brother to you.

***

In Nehemiah, why did the people weep when they heard the word of the Lord?  When they heard the Law read out loud to them for the first time in their lives as a community?

Was it because when they heard it they knew that at its heart it was a call to be one?

Perhaps they heard it and understood it in its totality, as a call to love God and to love one another with the maximum power that love holds.  Perhaps they wept because they knew they had not known such a way to live, and that they knew what a powerful command it was.

When they weep, they are encouraged with the words:

“Do not be grieved.  The joy of the Lord is your strength!” 

The Joy of the Lord is also our strength. 

The Joy of the Lord will give us the guidance to do what seems impossible, to make ourselves into one body, drinking from one Spirit.

It will give us the strength to walk in love—to help one another, care for one another, forgive one another—until we as a community, and not merely as individuals, find the wholeness that Jesus calls shalom.

We gather in this room and call it the church, but it is not about the room.

The church is the people who fill it.

Christian author Brian McLaren states: “One of our most common temptations is to turn the way into a place [or] to turn the adventure into a status.”

Being the body of Christ is a way to live.

Look around you.  Each of us is called—here today—to bless one another and to be united in the love of Christ. 

We are called to recognize the miracle and grace that comes to us in the single spirit from which we all drink, which makes us one.

Amen.