Lake Edge United Church of Christ

When I was a kid, I liked eating hot lunch at school, not so much because it hot but because it came served on plastic trays with partitions to keep the various food items separate from one another. It was a dream scenario for me, because when dinner was served, I liked having each item in its own pile, not touching anything else. I wasn’t a total basket case about this; I could and would eat a casserole with things all mixed together; but whenever possible, I preferred that nothing touch anything else. I didn’t understand why some people liked to mix things together; I liked peas, for example, and I liked carrots, but I didn’t see how anything was improved by turning these two good things into peas and carrots. I have memories of carefully sorting them out before eating. Now at home, I didn’t get much sympathy from Mom or Dad on this particular matter. The dinner plates were just plates, and things did get put closer together than I’d want sometimes, and my complaints fell on rather disinterested ears.

That just made hot lunch at school all the more attractive: spaghetti in the big rectangle, the fruit of the day in the circle, a veggie in the small rectangle, and a roll that was blessedly not soaking up wayward spaghetti sauce or pear juice safely sequestered in its own little square. Add the milk in the cute little carton, silverware and a napkin rolled together in the little slot along the side, and well, what more could a partition eater like me want? Nothing mixed, nothing touching, everything in its place, and everything right with the rest of the world.

“When I was a child,” the Apostle Paul once wrote, “I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child… but when I became an adult, I put away my childish ways.” And so, you’ll probably be glad to know, with me. I no longer mind separate food items touching. I’ve learned to enjoy dipping one item into another. I can even see and taste the benefit of mixing things together; I no longer sort my peas and carrots. And a good thing, too, because as you know, some of the most tasty of all dishes served anywhere are mixtures of many things, stewed and blended and cooked together. Gumbo, for example.

I had my first gumbo where everyone should have their first gumbo, in New Orleans, at a little dive in the French Quarter that had a Cajun band and a tiny dance floor that was filled with all the variety in which God’s people come: black and white, fat and slim, gay and straight, rich and poor, all sweaty and oblivious to any distinction between them, all lost in the music. And the gumbo! Ah, the gumbo! It was all there, the peppers and onions and tomatoes and the spices, the rice and sauce and okra and the shrimp. And these things had been cooked so thoroughly together that when you’d bite okra you’d taste okra and onion and pepper and tomato. Pick up a shrimp and it dripped with sauce redolent of okra and rice and spice. Each item was still itself, and yet it now contained everything else, too. All was in all, and I have to stop talking about it now, or my mouth will water too much for me to continue to preach safely. Partition eaters can’t do gumbo. And what a terrific loss it is for them!

Well and good, but what has the splendid progress that I’ve made from separating peas from carrots to relishing gumbo to do with the gospel of John? Well, Christian life is often described in a sort of partition way. Imagine: you wander down some side street and into the little Christianity Café, and someone hands you a plastic tray and invites you to order. You could have the proposition platter. Christian faith is often presented as a series of propositions that have to be believed. We usually call these proposition platters creeds, but they are made up of several items, all carefully separated into discrete items to be believed. Faith, according to the proposition platter model, is looking into each compartment, learning to like what’s there, and saying that you believe it. When you can do that with every item on the tray, then you clean your plate and become a full-born Christian. The proposition platter is one way to think about what it means to be a Christian.

Sometimes people present it as the law and order platter. This platter comes with compartments too, each one containing a law or rule that must be obeyed. Each of the Ten Commandments has a place on the law and order platter, but the compartments are apparently endless, because some denominations add dozens of entrees. Not just the biggies, “thou shalt not kill,” "thou shalt not steal,” but lesser rules too, about dancing or card playing or listening to the wrong sort of music. The law and order platter is popular, because it’s so concrete. Eat this, don’t eat that, and you’re good to go. The problem with the law and order platter is that it’s impossible to finish it: clean it up, and someone else will come along and add another serving. It’s a popular platter, but you can never eat it all.

Well, as I say, there are partition-type explanations for what being a follower of Jesus is all about. The proposition platter and the law and order platter are just two of the more popular.

“If you love me,” Jesus said in this morning’s gospel reading “you will keep my commandments,” and right away we think, here it comes, the law and order platter. But this is the gospel of John, and John is not a partition sort of Christian. He has Jesus tell us to obey his commandments, but then John tells us that there’s really only one commandment, which is to love one another as we have been loved by him, and you realize that if this is a law and order platter, it’s a strange one, not made up of dozens of discrete little laws or propositions but just one big one. And then he goes on to tell them that though he’s leaving them, he’s not going to leave them orphaned, because he’s going to ask the God to whom he is going home to be with to send another part of that very same God to be with them: the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, Jesus says in John, are all in one another; they’re all one. Though they can and sometimes do all stand separate and apart from one another, still they’re all in and through each other, and now that he’s leaving his disciples and sending the Advocate to be with them, his disciples will continue to be in him and he in them, as they are all in the Spirit and as all of them are together in God and yet somehow able to be identifiably separate from one another without losing the essential oneness. He goes on like this, and you begin to realize that he’s not serving up a vision of Christian life as a proposition platter or as a law and order platter or as any sort of partitioned platter at all, but rather as a giant pot of the most divine gumbo imaginable, in which we and Jesus and the Spirit and God in God’s own full self are all together and all one and yet still our individual selves as well.

It’s a very different vision of Christian life, is it not? It’s not so much about propositions to which we must give our intellectual assent. And it’s not so much about a list of rules and laws to be obeyed and embraced. Rather, the gumbo model would tell us, it’s about the wondrous power of love to bind together that which is separate, and which permits to stand as separate that which is really all One in the first place. To be a follower of Jesus is to become part of the gumbo, to lose oneself as an onion does, becoming in and through another, and to find that by losing yourself, you’ve made room in you for more than just one flavor, and that your being now includes the wonderful diversity of all God’s creation. John invites us to keep Jesus’ commandment to love one another as we have been loved, to get gumboed, lose ourselves, and so to gain ourselves. It is a marvelous vision, full and rich and far more tasty than the sum of the parts would suggest.

How do we go about it? How do we get gumboed? We start by listening, truly listening to those who are different from us. We listen for ways that we are similar and ways that we are different, and we listen because we believe that we can and must learn.

We follow listening by opening ourselves as well, by becoming vulnerable enough to share with another our own deep experiences, knowing that we are risking getting hurt but also anticipating that we are making ourselves available to be transformed by our encounter with another.

We listen, and we open ourselves, and then we trust that even in our differences we are not alone; we are not orphaned, for God is in and through us, and God is in and through the other, and we are in them and they are in us and we are all of us a part of one giant gumboed community of God’s humanity. In this work of being community, we are never alone, for our Advocate is with us, to guide, to teach, to encourage, to inspire, to listen, and to remind us that when we lose ourselves in the gumbo pot, we gain ourselves in new ways, and become more than we have ever been, because we are a part of that which is greater than ourselves.

Now there’s a vision of Christian life more powerful than a few propositions, more important than a platter full of laws. Get gumboed! Lose yourself in love for others, and discover that you are found in the center of the great communion of God. Amen.