Saturday, August 15, 2015

God's Scandalous Church


“’I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’” (John 6:51).

Though I’m not preaching on Sunday, this verse from the gospel reading has been haunting me all week.  On the surface Jesus’ words seem fairly harmless.  “I am the bread of life”.  I can preach that and maybe even do a fairly adequate job of it.  I mean how hard is it to talk about getting nourishment from Jesus?  I could stand up in the pulpit and point out the differences between God’s nourishment and the hollow nourishment of the world.  I could point to the times in Scripture when God has miraculously fed God’s people on their long and arduous journeys of faith.  Or I could use this text as an opportunity to talk about the importance of being fed weekly at the altar table of God’s love with a piece of bread and a sip of wine.  I could go to all these places and probably offend no one; At least no one who has made the “journey” to church on Sunday morning.   But I can’t go there.  Not this week.

For some reason the radicalness of Jesus’ words won’t let me go.  They won’t let me tame Jesus and his scandalous call to follow.  These words won’t even let me preach a sermon on the “whys” of Eucharist.  Sure I could preach a barn burner of a sermon about our need to be fed daily with the body and blood of Christ.  But I can’t go there. Not this week.

“The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”.  How in the world can the religious folks of Jesus’ day even stomach such a shock jock phrase?  A good religious person of Jesus’ day knows that any talk of flesh is unclean.  It is not kosher.  So, who does this Jesus think he is claiming that it is his flesh and blood that truly nourishes?  Jesus’ declaration turns everything upside down.  Every faith truth ever told; every faith assumption ever held is undone by this one sentence.  In Jesus’ day, flesh and blood are ritually unclean.  If contact is made with either, folks are cast out of community.  Without community survival is almost impossible.

Can we even begin to grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ words?  Surely these ancient kosher laws don’t apply to our lives, but in what scandalous ways does Jesus call us to follow?  In what scandalous ways does Jesus call us out of our safety zones?  In what scandalous ways does Jesus call us to abandon our theological certitudes?  In this post-modern world in which the church no longer finds itself at the center of society’s norms and mores, what is Jesus calling us to do and to be?  How open are we to God acting in new and creative ways?   How open are we to God’s reforming word re-defining all that we have taken for granted in the last 500 years?  How open are we to God changing the very definition of church?  The scriptural canon is certainly closed, but is it possible that God is still speaking?

Jesus’ words are radical both for his day and for ours.  But they are also filled with good news.  In keeping with the Hebrew notion of flesh and blood containing one’s total being, when Jesus talks about giving his flesh and blood, he is promising nothing less than the giving of his entire self.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t begin to get my head around that kind of love; that kind of love that holds nothing back.  And yet it is precisely that abiding love which not only nourishes and sustains us, but sends us back out into the world to feed God’s sheep.   How will we feed God’s sheep in the weeks, months, and years to come holding nothing back?  Join me in worship; in that place where the crucified and risen Christ has promised to be.  And let us discern together where God is calling us to travel and who God is calling us to be; no matter how radical and scandalous the call.

Peace and Love,

Pastor Doug

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