SERMONS

By Rev. Anthony B. Robinson, Sabbatical Pastor
Proverbs 9: 1 – 6; Ephesians 5: 15 – 20; John 6: 51 – 58
August 16, 2009

So I am imagining how this might go for a being from another planet who just happens to drop by church shopping today. What would he make of this?

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.”

He’s thinking, they’re cannibals? He steals a glance at the kindly-looking grandmother-type person who welcomed him to church. Could she be in on this? There are happy children near the front. They look normal? He decides not to stay for coffee hour.

Well, you get the idea. These are not easy words. “My flesh is true food, my blood is true drink.”

Moreover, Jesus is nothing if not insistent. Seven times in seven verses, some version of “Eat my flesh, drink my blood.”

This is now the fourth consecutive week of readings assigned to us by the Lectionary from the sixth chapter of John. I’m beginning to feel like whoever it was in the show or the ad that said, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!”

Truthfully, I never really intended to preach week-by-week from John 6, this material that manages to be at one and the same time both repetitive and challenging. Moreover, in thirty years of ministry, much of it spent preaching from the Lectionary, I have managed every year until now to avoid this summer breakdown of the Lectionary in John 6. As it always falls in late July and August, I’ve managed to be off fishing or at the beach. Well, that will teach me to be a sabbatical interim minister who is expected to show up in the summer!

But I also grateful for this challenging excursion in John 6. In each of the other three gospels–Matthew, Mark and Luke–there is a chapter devoted to Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples. In each are reported the words of Jesus said on that occasion, words which we repeat when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

In John’s Gospel there is nothing like those chapters of Matthew, Mark and Luke, no Last Supper in quite that way at all. Instead, this chapter, John 6, comes as close to what John wants to teach and communicate about Communion as anything in the entire Fourth Gospel.

And it seems that a good part of what John wants to say is that the important thing is not just correctly repeating the founder’s words as if they were a magic incantation. The important thing is connecting with Jesus himself. After all, it’s not “Do these things, remembering me.” It is “eat me, drink me.” It’s not, “Think about me.” It’s not even “believe in me.” It’s, “Take me into you.” Become part of me as I become part of you.

Still, it’s not easy to swallow. Even the disciples, as we will hear next week, say “This is a hard teaching.” For some, it proves too hard, just too much, and at this point they give up on Jesus and go elsewhere.

And Jesus does nothing at all to make it easier for them or for us. He pulls no punches. He is insistent, sort of rubbing our noses in the very carnal, earthy, flesh and blood-ness of it all.

Apparently, Jesus did not get the memo from the denomination’s Church Growth Division about being seeker-friendly and easy to take. He must have nodded off during that seminar when they talked about addressing people’s felt needs and making the whole church thing more accessible. Listen to how Eugene Peterson translates some of this passage in The Message. “At this, the Jews started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’” Next line, in Peterson’s translation, “But Jesus didn’t give an inch.” That pretty well catches the spirit of it. Insistent. Demanding.

As a pastor I have not been so courageous, so unflinching.

On a number of occasions, as a pastor, I have had people say to me, for example, “I just have trouble with the whole Easter thing.” Now for some there is a genuine pastoral issue, one that requires a sensitive listening and discerning. But what many of my crowd were saying was different. It was, “I am a modern person, enlightened; people rising from the dead. I can’t buy it. Just too much, this old religious myth. I am beyond that.”

My general strategy, different than Jesus’ here in John 6, was to try to make the whole thing easier to take. I might say, “Well, you know, it’s symbolic, don’t you think? Kind of about all life’s little deaths and new beginnings. Our various dyings and risings.” That never seemed to be all that convincing to who ever was pressing me, and I had an uneasy feeling that I was somehow selling out.

So one year, when one man came up and said his by-now-predictable, “I have trouble with Easter; can’t buy it,” I must have had my Wheaties that morning or something because I smiled and said, “Well, you would! After all, what would you want with a God who is breaking things open, turning the world upside down, saying this isn’t all there is? Look, you’re pretty well-fixed, being an attorney, this thing is working for you. What would you want with a God who raises the dead?”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

Then, I added, “But listen, ‘With God all things are possible.’ Stick around, I think we can help you.”

There’s a way in which a good deal of what is being served up in the church today about Jesus does seek to make the whole thing easier to swallow, to adjust the faith once received to current sensibilities. Jesus becomes an itinerant sage, an interesting teller of stories, a compelling teacher, perhaps a person to emulate, or someone who invites us on a spiritual journey. But he is not God incarnate, not the living Lord in whom the powers of sin and death have been broken and through whom a new creation at work among us. In the newer, friendlier Jesus, it is not all that clear that in him God has done anything important or decisive.

What’s going on when Jesus the spiritual guide replaces the insistent, in-your-face, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them” incarnate Lord?

I have come to this conclusion. We would rather not think that we need saving, that we need a Savior. Oh, we don’t mind a little help, a bit of instruction, advice maybe. But to acknowledge a need for an overhaul, for saving, to admit that we are helpless to save ourselves, that we depend utterly on God’s grace–well! It almost sounds un-American. It certainly does not sound very enlightened nor very sophisticated.

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

There is more, however, that can be said and perhaps needs to be said based on John 6, on Jesus’ insistent speaking of flesh and blood.

It’s common today to hear people say, for us to say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” In some ways, I think you can say that John’s presentation of Jesus supports this or fits in with it. This Jesus is all about vital connection. He is not about establishing an institution with rules and hierarchy.

So Jesus will speak often in John in very relational terms. “I am the vine, you are the branches.” “I am the way, the truth, the life.” “Abide in me as I abide in you.” For John’s Jesus it is about a real, living connection, as vital as the connection of a vine and a branch, or the even more vivid one of taking Jesus into us, becoming one with him and he with us in a meal. This is not a Jesus who is building an institution so much as he is building relationships. So in that sense, there’s a good fit with the current emphasis on spirituality if that means something alive and relational, not something that gets turned into by-laws and building programs.

But there’s another way in which there may be some tension with the current emphasis on spirituality. I can imagine some hearing the words, “Eat my flesh, drink my blood,” and saying “Yuck! That doesn’t sound very spiritual to me! That sounds messy, earthy, material.” Sometimes when people speak about spirituality they seem to mean some other world, some other dimension, a kind of getting away from this world with all its messiness, it’s nitty-gritty, its rawness, flesh and blood, and yes, death.

Over the years, for example, I’ve known people who have been troubled by the taking of an offering, money, in worship. They just felt that it didn’t belong. That it was too crass, too material. There was, for them, a divide between the spiritual and the material. Here, they felt, we should participate in a higher, a spiritual realm, not bringing something as tainted, even dirty, as money into it.

In some ways, this type of thinking–spirituality as a way of getting away–is very old. It’s the first century heresy of Docetism. The Docetists believed that Jesus was truly divine but not truly human. They claimed that he only appeared to be human. Jesus had donned a mask or cloak of humanity that he could rip off at the crucial moment to reveal he was not at all human but God.

The church answered the Docetists with a real mind-bender, claiming that Jesus is both, fully human and fully God; both together.” Thus Jesus speaks, relentlessly, here in John, not of a different or higher spiritual realm or plane, but of flesh and blood, of earth and heaven all bound up together. If you would follow me, says Jesus, you shall not find me in some clean and tidy spiritual other world where all is sunny and nice, but in all the messy, earthiness, all the flesh and blood drama of this life, this world.

Many years ago now I went off, from Oregon to New York City, to go to seminary. Our first child, who is now a 35 year old man, had just been borne, and so Linda stayed behind for a month in Portland with her parents. I went off to seminary and New York, where I was seized and intoxicated by that big, colorful city.

One day, one Saturday morning, I was out on the streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The sidewalks were packed with people. As you moved from one block to the next it was like moving from one part or culture of the world to another. The traffic was thick and noisy. Along the sidewalks people were selling all sorts of things, fruit, flowers and vegetables, cheap consumer goods. It was a city, bright, messy, noisy, rough, beautiful, and alive.

Suddenly, as I stood at a light waiting to cross the street, I heard a voice whisper in my ear, “Where is God in all of this?” Not your average street banter. I was taken a bit by surprise, but not entirely. As it happened the representatives of the Rev. Sun Yung Moon and his Unification Church were out in force that weekend on the streets. Rev. Moon was having a big rally in Madison Square Garden that night. So his devotees were out working the streets, probably looking particularly for people like me, young, alone and bedazzled.

“Where is God in all this?” whispered the voice in my ear.” And it was pretty clear that the implication was that God wasn’t anywhere to be found in all this, all this urban scene and urban squalor. The next word was an invitation to come away to a place and a group where I could find God.

Normally, I would have just ignored the question and offer. But since I was just about to start seminary and someone had asked me such an explicitly theological question, I felt sort of duty bound to answer. I thought for a minute, lifted my arms as if to embrace the life of the city and said, “Where’s God? God is here. God is in all this!”

Even though I hadn’t even begun my theological training, I still think that was a pretty good answer. The spiritual is not somewhere else, it’s here where Jesus came and comes, where Jesus is incarnate, where Jesus is flesh and blood, where Jesus calls us to follow him. Being spiritual doesn’t mean getting away to some other place or higher plane separate from life. At least for us, people whose Lord says, “Eat my flesh, drink my blood,” it means entering deeply into real, earthly, earthy life.

Sometimes too in the church we think that spiritual or being spiritual means that life in the church won’t be as messy or as painful or fraught with challenge or conflict as elsewhere. We come to church, we may think, to get away from all that. I understand that. And I am certainly not advocating that the church, or our experience of it, be painful or filled with conflict. There are churches like that. They aren’t a very good witness to Christ. Such congregations need to work to face and resolve issues and move onto ministries that are more centered in Christ and more life-giving.

But there will be times in most congregations, as in most human relationships, when the going gets rough. You at Bethany have experienced some of that this year in relation to some personnel issues. These are often very hard for churches. When such things happen, we may feel disappointed, even disillusioned. But remember this, though “disillusionment” is a painful thing, is not necessarily a bad thing. It means giving up our illusions. Sometimes our illusions are that here people are different, better, or more spiritual. But the truth is that we are not saved by our superior spirituality or greater virtue. We too are sinners, saved by the cross of Christ, by God’s mercy.

During hard times, some do turn away from a church, maybe not unlike the way some turned away from Jesus when he said these things about entering into his life and his way, which were not without pain, suffering, even death. Some turned away; it was just too scary, too messy.

But if the words of Jesus about flesh and blood mean anything, they mean that Jesus does not stand aloof from the world’s suffering or from the messiness of life. He enters into it and will be found in the midst of it.

I have been pleased to learn that we’re planning to do that on our upcoming Church Retreat the second weekend in September. The theme and focus, besides fun in the great out-of-doors, is how to be together in real and respectful ways when we don’t agree, even when we have conflict. So the theme for the Retreat is “Struggling Joyfully: Life Together in Christian Community.”

That seems to me a very important topic. As we watch, and maybe some of us participate in the health care debates and town hall meetings, we can see that we all have a lot to learn about how to be respectful and hang in together, when we disagree. We need to find some other options besides fight or flee.

So this is a good theme for our Retreat, where we will seek to listen to what Scripture teaches about dealing with conflict in the church and in our lives, and we learn some tools and techniques for respectful and edifying conversation and discussion when we are talking about tough issues.

Here’s the promise of Christ for us as we do this: Jesus is not off in some clean, distant, spiritual other-world where soft music plays and incense burns. Nor are we saved by managing to be “more spiritual” or better than other people.

Jesus is in the flesh and blood, down to earth, lip smacking, bread tearing, wine-pouring realities of this life. It is here that his life is poured out among us and for us. It is here, in this world, that he calls us to follow him. It is here that he shares our challenges and suffering and invites us to share his life, not a life held safely back; a life poured out for the forgiveness of all.