John 6:1-21
Proper 12 (17) - Year B
NRSV has Philip being "tested"
The Message has Philip's faith being "stretched"
For those who have test anxiety, and who doesn't who has grown up with a tricky G*D just waiting to catch you at something, shifting that to a growth experience of stretching is important. We might think about testing in terms of measuring ourselves against some external measurement or in competition with someone else where there can only be winners and losers. Stretching, on the other hand, is a yogic experience of measuring oneself against oneself. This is a difference between having to get to a particular spot right now and simply moving forward - arrival vs journey.
Without grace we have to get it right, right now and every time. With grace we can grow into new life, find our dead-ends, shift gears and directions, live within mysteries far too large for us.
I know that I have given more than one teacher fits because I see tests as a learning experience, not simply a measurement of how well I have encoded whatever the standard line is. How do you see the church testing people instead of growing them through stretching?
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/july2003.html
The disciples had a really good time after after being scared senseless. The reassurance and relief came at finally recognizing Jesus in the guise of Impossible Man. After all, who, half-way across a lake, expects anyone to show up striding alongside their stormy moment? When you are having a really good time, time speeds by. When you are having an ecstatically great time, time doesn't matter. Since Jesus wasn't mattering enough to sink, they might as well not matter how long anything is.
Was it the increased distance between fear and relief that bumped things into hypertime? Can that happen in just ordinary life?
Now transport this to economics, instead of the sea. Is it any less stormy in a culture where the annual pace of personal bankruptcies continues to hold stead at 1.4 million for each of the past five years, an average of 7,000 per hour as household debt topped $7.6 trillion in 2001, a record-breaking 73% of GDP, while home mortgage foreclosures reached a 30-year high. The typical American now works 184 hours longer than in 1970, an additional 4-1/2 weeks on the job for nine percent more pay. [information from Jeff Gates in "We the Unreasonable," Tikkun, July/August 2003]
Where might we put our care for people into effect to bring us again to hypertime? It will mean the equivalent of walking on water. To do that we will need to take ourselves very lightly and discipline ourselves quite intentionally. We need to work as unreasonably with economics as Jesus worked unreasonably with physical phenomena. And the list will go on regarding working unreasonably with the falsity of redemptive violence, repressed sexuality and the rest of the powers of the principalities.
Pick your arena and walk forward.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/july2003.html
Bathsheba and Jesus were both faced with being taken by force. Their circumstances and options were different. Male and Female, Subject and Master, are significant variations.
Both Bathsheba and Jesus were strengthened that they could live through their respective situations.
Bathsheba acquiesced to force; Jesus withdrew from it. There probably isn't one right response to a test.
Of interest is the use of intermediaries by David and Jesus. There were those who responded to inquiries about Bathsheba and Uriah carrying his own death warrant to Joab, who undertook it. There was Philip who didn't play along, Andrew who did, and the disciples who facilitated a feast.
Questions of how we respond to force come at us every day. Likewise, choices of how we are going to respond to requests from authorities. So, how's today for you? Whose intermediary have you been so far and whose do you anticipate being later today?
- - -
evil requires
accessories
before and after
the fact
under this spreading net
a village smithy stands
strong of arm
stronger of heart
rooted elsewhere
bringing solidarity of port
to those adrift
on the sea
an adult
remembering their child
rich in fish and bread
richer in sharing
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
Pentecost as surprise seems to grow out of the anti-Pentecost of foreknowing (verse 6). How this can be, I do not know. Basically I think John got it wrong — that Jesus was as surprised as anyone that water became wine, that five loaves and two fish became a feast for thousands.
Certainly hope and trust were engaged, but guarantees make this into magic, not revelation.
Either way, the validation was not the manifestation of mulitiplication, but the recognition of an experience breaking boundaries.
Again, why a response to such an experience was an attempt to force it into political meaning is a mystery to me. We do such out of lack of imagination of what simple thanks might do and resistance to rearrange our systems of gross national product into gross national happiness.
Thankfully Jesus recognized his surprise at the multiplication and at the crowd’s response and took off for parts unknown.
Now, return to the gathering of the fragments after the feast. What would you do with them? How might they be sown further? Do they represent you in your simply having been gathered in or in your being sown in people’s lives to reveal mysterious experiences of contentment and enough, again and again?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/07/john-61-21.html